clips & quotes

Imminent Decline of Empire?

2006-04-12T18:06:00.000-07:00

ZNet | Foreign Policy

Imminent Decline of Empire?

by Ramzy Baroud; April 12, 2006

The miscalculated policies of the US administration in the Middle East are quickly depleting the country’s ability to sustain its once unchallenged global position. Winds of change are blowing everywhere, and there is little that Washington’s ideologues can do to stop it.

The above claim is increasingly finding its way into the realm of mainstream thinking, despite all attempts to mute or relegate its import. A recent speech by US Republican congressman and chairman of the House of international relations committee, Henry Hyde was the focal point of analysis by Martin Jacques in The Guardian. "Our power has the grave liability of rendering our theories about the world immune from failure. But by becoming deaf to easily discerned warning signs, we may ignore long-term costs that result from our actions and dismiss reverses that should lead to a re-examination of our goals and means," Hyde said.

In his poignant analysis — decoding Hyde’s deliberately implicit thoughts — Jacques argued, "The Bush administration stands guilty of an extraordinary act of imperial overreach which has left the US more internationally isolated than ever before, seriously stretched financially, and guilty of neglect in east Asia and elsewhere."

Ironically, the invasion of Iraq with its "thousands of tactical" mistakes — as recently admitted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — was meant to solidify and ensure the US’ post Cold-War global dominance. According to Jacques, as inferred from Hyde’s notable speech, "It may well prove to be a harbinger of its decline." It can also be argued that the US adventurism in Iraq has provided the coveted opportunity to other countries to further their national and regional interests without the constant fear of US reprisals.

In a recent interview, MIT professor Noam Chomsky, known for his sharp criticism of US foreign policy particularity in Indochina, Central and Latin America, delineated a new global political reality that is being forged as the US stubbornly insists on fighting a lost battle in Iraq. "What’s happening is something completely new in the history of the hemisphere. Since the Spanish conquest, the countries of Latin America have been pretty much separated from one another and oriented towards the imperial power. For the first time, they are beginning to integrate and in quite a few different ways."

That integration is evident, according to Chomsky, not only by examining the rise of the Left in these countries and the almost immediate alliances — economic cooperation, for example — that these popular governments have achieved. There is a simultaneous rise of the political relevance of the indigenous Indian population in Bolivia, and the opportunities it represents to the Indian population of Ecuador and Peru. Moreover, there is a noteworthy South-South integration that is already breaking regional boundaries and significantly undermining the overpowering grip of the IMF, which has played the infamous role of the unfair middleman between the rich and hapless poor.

China and India, on the other hand, continue to achieve astounding economic growth with China’s economic might and relevance to soon surpass that of the US. In fact, there is an intense diplomatic clash underway between the US and China, since the latter has dared to violate the understanding of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which gave the US alone the right to manage its Latin American domains. For the first time, says a BBC analysis, a foreign country has challenged American influence in the region, and successfully so. Indeed, China is upgrading its economic relations with Brazil — both increasingly formidable economic powers — in ways that will eventually help Brazil break away from a domineering US hold.

These are all part of the "warning signs" to which Hyde was refereeing in his speech. While there are indications that Washington is finally waking up to this grim reality, which it has helped create, there are no signs whatsoever that a fundamental change of course in US foreign policy in the Middle East is taking place: the destructive war in Iraq rages on; the self-inflicting damage of unconditionally backing Israel in its endless colonial ambitions perpetuates; and the same detrimental policy line used with Iraq is employed, almost identically with Iran. US policy planners are as ever insistent on following the same destructive course that has compromised their nation’s global standing.

Instead of paying attention to these woes, the Bush administration is trying to recover some of its Southeast Asia losses by signing a nuclear treaty with India, an action that reeks of double standards and miscalculations. The administration has also lifted the ban on sales of lethal arms to Indonesia in recognition of its "unique strategic role in Southeast Asia," despite protests from human rights groups.

Despite Bush’s recent ‘historic’ trip to India and other top officials’ hasty attempts to reassert America’s global dominance, there should be no illusions that the US’ chief foreign policy debacle starts and ends with the Middle East — especially its ‘special’ relationship with Israel. While the latter has served the role of the client state since its establishment on ethnically cleansed Palestinian territories, this relationship was significantly altered in recent years, with the pro-Israeli lobby taking centre stage, not simply by influencing US foreign policy toward Israel, but eventually by directing it altogether in the region.

The rise of the neoconservatives helped create the false impression that the US and Israeli policies are one and the same, including their mutual interests in maintaining Israel’s military "edge" over its neighbors, which eventually led to the invasion of Iraq. While the neocons are washing their hands of any responsibility in the Middle East impasse, the Bush administration’s arrogance is stopping it from immediately withdrawing its troops from Iraq and reassessing its relationship with Israel.

The world is changing, yet the US government refuses to abandon its old ways: militaristic, self-defeating and overbearing. Indeed, the US must remold, not only its policies in the Middle East, but also its hegemonic policies throughout the world. For once, the US administration needs to tap into its sense of reason, and discern the "warning signs", that should lead to "the re-examination of [its] goals and means." A first step is to bring the troops home, and with them the entire doctrine that unrestrained violence and perpetual wars can further the cause of an already distrusted superpower.

-Veteran Arab American journalist Ramzy Baroud teaches mass communication at Australia’s Curtin University of Technology, Malaysia Campus. His most recent book, Writings on the Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle has been published by Pluto Press, London.

The War and the Economy

2006-04-05T13:18:00.000-07:00

Interview with Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz

"The War Is Bad for the Economy"

Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, 63, discusses the true $1 trillion cost of the Iraq conflict, its impact on the oil market and the questions of whether the West can afford to impose sanctions on Iran.

REUTERS

Escalating costs of war: A U.S. soldier runs for cover in the northern Iraq town of Tal Afar, September 2005.

SPIEGEL: Professor Stiglitz, at the beginning of the Iraq war, the United States administration was hoping to almost break even in terms of the costs ...

Stiglitz: ... they truly believed the Iraqi people could use their oil revenues to pay for reconstruction.

SPIEGEL: And now you are estimating the cost of war at levels between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. How do you explain this difference?

Stiglitz: First, the war was much more difficult than President Bush and his government expected. They thought they were going to walk in, everybody would say thank you, and they would set up a democratic government and leave. Now that this war is lasting so much longer, they constantly have to adapt their budget. It rose from $50 billion to $250 billion. Today, the Congressional Budget Office talks about $500 billion or more for this adventure.

SPIEGEL: That's still by far lower than your own calculations.

Stiglitz: The reported numbers do not even include the full budgetary costs to the government. And the budgetary costs are but a fraction of the costs to the economy as a whole. And compare this to Gulf War number one, where America almost made a profit!

SPIEGEL: Because Germany paid for it?

Stiglitz: Because Germans paid, because everybody paid. We got our allies to pay full price for used equipment, and we got to refurbish our military. This time, most of the other countries were not willing to do so again.

SPIEGEL: Did Bush just miscalculate, or was he misleading the public about the true costs of war?

Stiglitz: I think it was both. He wanted to believe it was not going to be expensive, he wanted to believe it would be easy. But there's also enormous evidence now that information channels into the White House were distorted. Bush wanted only certain information, and that's mostly what they supplied him with. Larry Lindsey ...

SPIEGEL: ... the White House's former top economic adviser ...

Stiglitz: ... gave -- back in 2002 -- a number of up to $200 billion. I think that was the most accurate inside information at the time. He was dismissed. They didn't want to hear it.

SPIEGEL: In the US, the financial costs of war are seldom discussed. It used to be considered a sacrifice to achieve common goals. Why is it different today?

Stiglitz: This is not like a world war where you're attacked. We were attacked in Pearl Harbor, we had to respond. This time, we had a choice, we had to decide how and who we are going to attack ...

SPIEGEL: ... and if you can afford it.

Stiglitz: Well, we can afford it, that's not the issue. The issue is: $1 trillion or $2 trillion is a lot of money. If our objective is to have stability in the Middle East, secure oil, or extend democracy, you can do a lot of democracy buying for this sum. To put it in context: The whole world spends $50 billion a year on foreign aid. So what we're talking about is multiplying the foreign aid budget 20-fold. Wouldn't you say this could do more for peace and stability and security?

Jürgen Frank

Prof Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize Laureate.

SPIEGEL: Bush would argue it's worth spending that much to decrease the probability of a major terrorist attack on the US.

Stiglitz: Nobody takes that seriously. Instead, most people think the Iraq war has increased the probability of an attack. However, it's difficult to put this aspect into financial terms.

SPIEGEL: How did you calculate the costs of the war?

Stiglitz: The official figures are only the tip of an enormous iceberg. For instance, one of the costs of the war is that soldiers today get very seriously injured but stay alive, and we can keep them alive but at an enormous price.

SPIEGEL: Is this the biggest item in your calculations?

Stiglitz: It's very important. The Bush administration has been doing everything it can to hide the huge number of returning veterans who are severely wounded -- 17,000 so far including roughly 20 percent with serious brain and head injuries. Even the estimate of $500 billion ignores the lifetime disability and healthcare costs that taxpayers will have to spend for years to come. And the administration isn't even generous with veterans, widows and their kids.

SPIEGEL: What does that mean?

Stiglitz: If you're injured in an automobile accident, and you sue the driver, you get much more for your injury than if you're fighting for your country. There's a double standard here. If you happen to put your life at risk fighting for your country, you get a little. If you walk across the street and get injured, you get a lot more. Similarly, payments for a dead soldier amount to only $500,000, which is far less than standard estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death. This statistical value of a life in the US amounts to circa $6.5 million.

SPIEGEL: How much will a severely brain-damaged soldier cost the US government?

Stiglitz: My moderate estimate is about $4 million. For this group alone there will be a total cost of $35 billion that nobody is talking about. But look at the broader picture: The Veterans Administration originally projected that roughly 23,000 veterans returning from Iraq would seek medical care last year. But in June 2005, it revised this number to an estimated 103,000. No wonder the Veterans Administration had to appeal Congress for emergency funding of $1.5 billion last year.

DER SPIEGEL

Graphic: The Costs of the Iraq War

SPIEGEL: If this is a $1 trillion war, why couldn't the US provide its soldiers with safer body armor and better protected vehicles?

STIGLITZ: Obviously, the US can afford to pay for body armor. Rumsfeld, our Secretary of Defense, said you have to fight with the armor you have, but that's unconscionable. The military is focusing only on the short run costs. If they don't provide appropriate body armor, they save some money today, but the healthcare cost is going to be the future for some other president down the line. I view that as both fiscally and morally irresponsible.

SPIEGEL: This war could have been both safer for the troops and cheaper for the country?

Stiglitz: Exactly.

SPIEGEL: Is war no longer affordable even for countries as rich as the United States?

Stiglitz: You have to remember we are an economy of $13 trillion a year. The issue is not whether you can afford it but whether this is the way you want to spend your money. In using the limited resources that we have for fighting this war, we have less resources to do other things. You saw on your TV what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The Reserves or National Guard are usually the people we use for those national emergencies. They weren't here, they were over in Iraq, and so we were less protected.

SPIEGEL: Before the invasion of Iraq, the US administration said the best way to keep oil prices in check is a short and successful war. A barrel was at $25 at that time, and now it's over $60. What of this increase is due to Iraq?

Stiglitz: In our analysis about the cost of war, we only assumed a modest $5 to $10 caused by the war. We wanted to keep our study conservative, so no one would dispute our numbers, and no one did. But I believe that's a vast underestimation of the true cost.

SPIEGEL: But why? China and India are increasing their demand, real global growth has been going on. This is driving the prices.

Stiglitz: When demand rises so does supply -- that's how markets usually work. Now we're seeing that demand for oil is rising but we're not getting a commensurate increase in supply. And there's a simple answer, it's Iraq. But it's not just because it production has been down.

SPIEGEL: Why else?

Stiglitz: The Middle East is the lowest cost producer in the world. They can produce oil for $10, $15 or $20 a barrel. Now we have the technology to produce oil elsewhere for $35 to $45. But who wants to develop fields or invest in new technologies elsewhere if they know that in five years' time, the Middle East may be supplying oil at previous prices?

SPIEGEL: In other words, were peace and stability re-established in the Middle East, the oil price would be back to maybe $25, despite the huge global hunger for energy?

Stiglitz: Yes. By the way that's the price level oil traders were speculating on in futures trading before the outbreak of war.

SPIEGEL: There should be huge economic pressure on Bush to end this conflict.

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Stiglitz: The only people benefiting in this war are Bush's friends in the oil industry. He has done the American economy and the global economy an enormous disfavor, but his Texan friends couldn't be happier. The price of oil is up, and they make money when the price of oil goes up. Their profits are at record levels.

SPIEGEL: You don't like this president very much.

Stiglitz: Oh, it's nothing personal. It's all about his politics.

SPIEGEL: There is an old saying: War is good for the economy.

Stiglitz: Listen, World War II was really unusual, because America was in the Great Depression before. So the war did help the US economy to get securely out of this decline. This time, the war is bad for the economy in both the short and long run. We could have spent trillions in research or education instead. This would have led to future productivity increases.

SPIEGEL: So is the economical mess of the Iraq war even bigger than the political?

Stiglitz: Well, we are so rich, we are able to withstand even this level. Crowding out other investments, weakening the economy in the future, that's not a crisis yet. But it's an erosion. It becomes an issue for our legislators. And don't forget the serious issues of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea. We used up our ability to deal with something serious by dealing with something that was less serious.

SPIEGEL: What's your economic view on Iran?

Stiglitz: We are helping the people that Bush says are evil. Teheran couldn't be happier about the high oil prices resulting from the Iraq war.

SPIEGEL: If the UN Security Council votes for sanctions over Iran and its oil exports, what would that mean for the world economy?

Stiglitz: It would mean an enormous disruption, as oil prices might rise over $100. You can increase the price from $25 to $40, and people can absorb it. If the price rises above $60, they become unhappy. They start to adjust, they move to smaller cars, drive a little bit less. At $100 or $120, there are major changes in lifestyle. The sales of cars will plummet. Poor people will be facing real problems of heat versus food.

SPIEGEL: The world can't afford sanctions at this time?

Stiglitz: We talk about not allowing their officials to get visas to visit our countries.

SPIEGEL: That's not a harsh measure.

Stiglitz: It's no sanction. So the answer is, yes, we have no effective sanctions.

SPIEGEL: Professor Stiglitz, thank you for this interview.

Interview conducted by Frank Hornig and Georg Mascolo.

2006-03-24T18:45:00.000-08:00

Not a Drop to Drink

In Parched Latin American Countries,
the Battle over Water is Ready to Explode

By Kelly Hearn

American Prospect
February 25, 2005

In El Alto, Bolivia, a populist drumbeat is being heard -- and it's about water. Protesters say a foreign-owned company contracted to manage the city’s water system has failed to get enough of it to El Alto’s poor. When protesters shut down a major road, Bolivia’s president, Carlos Mesa, axed the state contract with the company, which is part-owned by the gigantic French water corporation Suez.

It's not the first time Bolivian protesters have sent a huge multinational firm packing. In 1997, the World Bank forced Bolivia to privatize its water system as a loan contingent. In 2000, residents of the city Cochabamba took to the streets when connection fees rose steeply after a subsidiary of California-based construction giant Bechtel took over. The Bolivian government violently suppressed the protests, and the events were documented and spread across the Internet by Jim Shultz, founder of the Democracy Project, a Bolivian-based watchdog group. In the end, Bechtel pulled out and sued the Bolivian government for $25 million under a bilateral investment treaty. The case is now pending. Water privatization has hit bumps in Argentina, too, where President Nestor Kirchner has been sparring with Aguas Argentinas, also a subsidiary of Suez, over claims that the company has not lived up to its infrastructure investment promises.

As global freshwater shortages loom, water has become a political pulse point in Latin America, which in recent years has increasingly backed away from the more conservative policies of the 1990s and elected left-leaning governments. The World Bank estimates that 76 million of the 510 million people in the Caribbean and Latin America do not have access to safe drinking water. Bank officials embrace privatization as a panacea, and multinational corporations are happy to get closer to Latin America’s vast water supply (when global water shortages really hit, it’s nice to be a supplier of last resort).

Here in South America, shoddy delivery and treatment systems, poor oversight, and wasteful cultures of use present their own problems for water. But the great sucking noise will come from trade law, from developing countries signing their water resources over to private companies via deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), deals that treat water as “goods” and “investments.” The International Forum on Globalization, based in San Francisco, has mapped how noxious provisions from NAFTA, now incorporated into CAFTA, will favor multinational corporations and spell disaster for developing countries.

Consider NAFTA’s Chapter 11, the investor-state provision. Locked into CAFTA and favored for inclusion in the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the provision lets corporations (investors) sue governments (states) if they feel they have lost out on economic opportunity. Translation: If any country, state, or province lets only domestic companies export water, corporations in the other signatory countries could sue for financial compensation for “discrimination.” And if a government attempted to ban bulk water exports, says Antonia Juhasz, an International Forum on Globalization analyst, the very act would automatically turn water into a tradable commodity, which in turn would trigger the CAFTA or, if it’s resuscitated, the FTAA. Under such a scheme, a lot of Bechtels could sue a lot of Bolivias for money that might otherwise be spent on lifting people from poverty.

Huhasz, in an IFG study, says other trade provisions favored by the U.S. right could spell problems for water-rich developing nations that sign up for regional trade agreements: The idea of “proportional sharing,” embedded in NAFTA´s article 315, prohibits signatories from restricting resource exports, cutting off a country´s ability to curtail water exports. Another is a WTO principle that any new laws, including environmental laws, must be “least trade restrictive,” a provision the IFG report says has been the death of many environmental laws. These are concepts that vastly expand the rights of multinational investors trying to get close to Latin America's water systems and supplies. The legalisms may be lost on most Latin Americans, but the greed behind them certainly is not. Judging from their presence on the Internet, the Cochabamba protests seem, like Kent State or Tiananmen Square, to symbolize greater struggles. More than a rejection of water privatization and commodification, they are an indictment of aggressive, U.S.-backed trade policies, of insatiable First World greed, of the corporate march across civil society.

The Economist, citing World Bank statistics, recently report that privatization in the 1990s expanded the access that Latin Americans have to water by 40 percent to 70 percent. But observers suggest that lower-tech options could come before widespread corporate-favoring privatization contracts. Activists such as Canadian Maude Barlow has suggested radical shifts in watershed management and production, infrastructure repairs, reclamation of outdated water systems, and drip irrigation as opposed to flood irrigation.

Here in South America, the lessons are getting clearer by the protest; the world would do well to study the lessons of Cochabamba and El Alta. Global water shortages, corporate creep, and devastating trade agreements are bringing us fast to a place where, as one water company reportedly described it, water has gone from an endless commodity taken for granted to “a rationed necessity that may be taken by force.”

About the Author: Kelly Hearn is a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and a former science and technology reporter for United Press International.

More Information on Social and Economic Policy
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British Companies Making a Fortune out of Iraq Conflict - Security Council - Global Policy Forum

2006-03-24T15:23:00.000-08:00

British Companies Making a Fortune
out of Iraq Conflict

By Robert Verkaik

Independent
March 13, 2006

A total of 61 British companies are identified as benefiting from at least £1.1bn of contracts and investment in the new Iraq. But that figure is just the tip of the iceberg.

British businesses have profited by at least £1.1bn since coalition forces toppled Saddam Hussein three years ago, the first comprehensive investigation into UK corporate investment in Iraq has found. The company roll-call of post-war profiteers includes some of the best known names in Britain's boardrooms as well many who would prefer to remain anonymous. They come from private security services, banks, PR consultancies, urban planning consortiums, oil companies, architects offices and energy advisory bodies.

Among the top earners is the construction firm Amec, which has made an estimated £500m from a series of contracts restoring electrical systems and maintaining power generation facilities during the past two years. Aegis, which provides private security has earned more than £246m from a three-year contract with the Pentagon to co-ordinate military and security companies in Iraq. Erinys, which specialises in the same area, has made more than £86m, a substantial portion from the protection of oilfields.

The evidence of massive investments and the promise of more multimillion-pound profits to come was discovered in a joint investigation by Corporate Watch, an independent watchdog, and The Independent. The findings show how much is stake if Britain were to withdraw military protection from Iraq. British company involvement at the top of Iraq's new political and economic structures means Iraq will be forced to rely on British business for many years to come.

A total of 61 British companies are identified as benefiting from at least £1.1bn of contracts and investment in the new Iraq. But that figure is just the tip of the iceberg; Corporate Watch believes it could be as much as five times higher, because many companies prefer to keep their relationship secret. The waters are further muddied by the Government's refusal to release the names of companies it has helped to win contracts in Iraq.

Many of the companies enjoy long-standing relationships with Labour and now have a financial stake in the reconstruction of Iraq in Britain's image. Of the total profits published in the report, the British taxpayer has had to meet a bill for £78m while the US taxpayer's contribution to UK corporate earnings in Iraq is nearly nine times that. Iraqis themselves have paid British company directors £150m.

The report acknowledges that British business still lags behind the huge profits paid to American companies. But, in two fields, Britain is playing a critical and leading role. The threat from the Iraqi insurgency means British private security companies are in great demand. Corporate Watch estimates there are between 20,000 and 30,000 security personnel working in Iraq, half of whom are employed by companies run by retired senior British officers and at least two former defence ministers.

The biggest British player, Aegis - run by Tim Spicer, the former British army lieutenant colonel who founded the security company Sandline - has a workforce the size of a military division and may rank as the largest corporate military group ever assembled, according to the report. Other private security companies have sprung up overnight to protect British and American civilians. Britain is also playing a leading role in advising on the creation of state institutions and the business of government. PA Consulting, which has also received a contract for advising on the Government's ID cards scheme, worth around £19m, is now a key adviser in Iraq.

Adam Smith International, a body closely linked to the right-wing think-tank used by Margaret Thatcher, has been heavily involved in the foundation of the Iraqi government and continues to influence its newly formed ministries. According to the Tory MP Quentin Davies, who visited Iraq, the advisers are "reordering Iraqi government operations at the most basic level, to help restructure some of the Iraqi ministries, in fact physically restructure them, even suggesting how the minister's office should be laid out".

Another favourite of the Thatcher governments, now involved in Iraq, is Tim Bell, who ran the Tories' election campaigns in 1979, 1983 and 1987. His PR firm Bell-Pottinger has been involved in advising on the 2004 elections and a strategic campaign to promote bigger concepts such as the return of sovereignty, reconstruction, support for the army and police, minority rights and public probity.

Loukas Christodoulou, of Corporate Watch, has been monitoring British business relations with Iraq since the invasion. He says in his conclusion to our joint report: "The presence of these consultants in Iraq is arguably a part of the UK government's policy to push British firms as lead providers of privatisation support. The Department for International Development has positioned itself as a champion of privatisation in developing countries. The central part UK firms are playing in reshaping Iraq's economy and society lays the ground for a shift towards a corporate-dominated economy. This will have repercussions lasting decades."

In five years, the £1.1bn of contracts identified in the report will be dwarfed by what Britain and the US hope to reap from investments. Highly lucrative oil contracts have yet to be handed out.

More Information on Iraq
More Information on Corporate Contracts

For the original Report see Corporate Carveup: British Corporations in Iraq

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/contract/2006/0313britishcompanies.htm

Patents pending

2006-03-23T06:36:00.000-08:00

Patents pending

Writing in Legal Times, Tony Mauro reports on yesterday's Supreme Court arguments over the reaches of U.S. patent law:

"Supreme Court justices appeared reluctant Tuesday to decide a key patent law case in a way that would, as one justice put it, establish 'monopolies in this country beyond belief' over naturally occurring phenomena.

Justice Stephen Breyer expressed that concern during oral arguments in Laboratory Corp. of America v. Metabolite, a dispute that tests the scope of patentability. Other justices indicated sympathy with the solicitor general's view that the case should be sent back to lower courts for further review."

An editorial in The New York Times calls the case a reminder that the system has become Patently Ridiculous:

"The Supreme Court now appears ready to weigh in and -- we hope -- restore some sanity to the system. Yesterday the court heard arguments on whether the patent for a blood test for a vitamin deficiency was so broadly construed that it included a natural process of the human body and the idea of how to interpret it. Such a patent could prevent other inventors from developing new and better tests. The court will also hear arguments next week in a case attacking eBay, the global marketplace."

More information on the case is available from the Supreme Court's docket.

March 22, 2006 | Permalink

Lawyers barred from using own names

2006-03-23T06:30:00.000-08:00

Lawyers barred from using own names

It is a truism that clients hire lawyers not law firms. But what happens when lawyers and firms stake competing claims in the same name? The federal court in Connecticut recently barred two lawyers from using their own names in the name of their firm. The name of their New London firm, Suisman & Shapiro, formed in 2004, violated the trademark of another, much-older New London firm Suisman, Shapiro, Wool, Brennan, Gray & Greenberg, the court said.

The lawyers at the center of the dispute, S. Joel Suisman and Andrew Shapiro, are both former members of the original firm and the sons of its founders. When the younger Suisman left the original firm in 2004 and joined with Shapiro to start the new firm, the original firm sued in federal court alleging violations of federal and state trademark and trade practices laws. In June 2004, U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall entered a preliminary order against the new firm's use of the name. On Feb. 15, she made that order permanent.

The judge explained:

"A reasonable fact finder could reach no conclusion, on the basis of the undisputed evidence, other than that, in the market for legal services in Connecticut, the mark 'Suisman Shapiro' has become synonymous with, and refers distinctly to, the entity that is the plaintiff law firm. Accordingly, the plaintiff firm has demonstrated that the mark in question has, as a matter of law, acquired secondary meaning and is entitled to protection under the Lanham Act."

A 2004 New York Lawyer report on the preliminary injunction provides more background on the case.

March 22, 2006 | Permalink

Truisms - William Lloyd Garrison - January 8, 1831

2006-03-17T05:58:00.000-08:00

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Truisms
William Lloyd Garrison
January 8, 1831

1. All men are born equal, and entitled to protection, excepting those whose skins are black and hair woolly; or, to prevent mistake, excepting Africans, and their descendants.

2. If white men are ignorant and depraved, they ought freely to receive the benefits of education; but if black men are in this condition, common sense dictates that they should be held in bondage, and never instructed.

3. He who steals a sheep, or buys one of a thief, deserves severe punishment. He who steals a negro, or buys him of a kidnapper, is blameless. Why? Because a sheep can be eaten, and a negro cannot; because he has a black fleece, and it a white one; (1) because the law asserts that this distinction is just—and law, we all know, is founded in equity; and because pure benevolence actuates in the one case, and downright villany [sic] in the other.

4. The color of the skin determines whether a man has a soul or not. If white, he has an immortal essence; if black, he is altogether beastly. Mulattoes, however, derive no benefit from this rule.

5. The blacks ought to be held in fetters, because they are too stupid to take care of themselves; at least, we are not so stupid as to suffer them to make the experiment.

6. To kidnap children on the coast of Africa is a horrid crime, deservedly punishable with death; but he who steals them, in this country, as soon as they are born, performs not merely an innocent but a praiseworthy act.

7. In Africa, a man who buys or sells another, is a monster of hell. In America, he is an heir of heaven.

8. A man has a right to heap unbounded execration upon the foreign slave trade, and the abettors thereof; but if he utter a sentiment derogatory to the domestic traffic, or to those who assist in the transportation of victims, he is to be imprisoned for publishing a libel, and sentenced to pay a fine of not less than one thousand dollars.

9. He who calls American slaveholders tyrants, is a fool, a fanatic, or a madman; but if he apologise for monarchical governments, or an hereditary aristocracy, set him down as a tory, and a traitor to his country.

10. There is not the least danger of a rebellion among the slaves; and even if they should revolt en masse, what could they do? Their united physical force would be utterly contemptible.

11. None but fanatics or idiots desire immediate abolition. If the slaves were liberated at once, our throats would be cut, and our houses pillaged and burnt!

12. Our slaves must be educated for freedom. Our slaves must never learn the alphabet, because knowledge would teach them to throw off their yoke.

13. People at the north have no right to alleviate physical suffering, or illumine spiritual darkness, at the south; but they have a right to assist the Greeks, or the Hindoos, or any foreign nation.

14. Were the slaves, goaded to desperation, to rise against their masters, the free states are constitutionally bound to cut their throats! "The receiver is as bad as the thief." The free states receive and consume the productions of slave labor! The District of Columbia is national property: slavery exists in that District! Yet the free states are not involved in the guilt of slavery!

15. A white man, who kills a tyrant, is a hero, and deserves a monument. If a slave kill his master, he is a murderer, and deserves to be burnt.

16. The slaves are kept in bondage for their own good. Liberty is a curse to the free people of color—their condition is worse than that of the slaves! Yet it would be very wicked to bind them with fetters for their good!

17. The slaves are contented and happy. If sometimes they are so ungrateful or deluded as to abscond, it is pure philanthropy that induces their masters to offer a handsome reward for their detection.

18. Blacks have no intellect. The laws, at the south, which forbid their instruction, were not enacted because it was supposed these brutes had brains, or for the sake of compliment, but are owing simply to an itch for superfluous legislation.

19. Slaves are held as property. It is the acme of humanity and justice, therefore, in the laws, to recognise them also as moral agents, and punish them in the most aggravated manner, if they perpetrate a crime; though they cannot read, and have neither seen nor known the laws!

20. It is foolish and cruel for an individual to denounce slavery; because the more he disturbs the security of the masters, the more vindictive will be their conduct toward the slaves. For the same reason, we ought to prefer the products of slave labor to those of free; as the more wealthy masters become, the better they will be enabled to feed and clothe their menials.

21. To deny that a man is a christian or republican, who holds slaves and dooms their children to bondage, is most uncharitable and in-consistent.

22. To say that a clerical slavite is bound to follow his own precepts, or to obey the seventh and tenth commandments, is preposterous.

23. To doubt the religious vitality of a church, which is composed of slaveholders, is the worst species of infidelity.

24. The Africans are our slaves—not because we like to oppress, or to make money unjustly—but because Noah’s curse must be fulfilled, and the scriptures obeyed.

The Socialism of Water

2006-03-13T07:10:00.000-08:00

The Socialism of Water
A socialism of water is what we have built in the United States and yet we are unable to recognize it.

Most people in the U.S. value the fact that they have water flowing from their taps but our rulers consider the idea of socialism an evil in itself. Thus nobody even discusses the fact that water is a highly subsidized resource supplied to us by government agencies (or agencies closely connected to the state) at very low cost. Nobody in the elite dares call our water system, a socialist system, because then people might want other kinds of socialism, say, in health care. We in the United States are detached from the history of water. We take it for granted. . We take for granted the large government projects that have given us a system of water socialism, supplying large industrial farms and mega-cities with great supplies of gushing water. The U.S. system of cities would not be able to exist without water socialism.

We also take for granted the "successes" and failures of the urban and industrial revolutions that provided us with our socialism of water.

There are many things, good and bad, that one can say about our unique socialism of water in the U.S. And because I am in favor of libertarian socialism myself I will work against the grain and begin with some of the bad things. Sometimes our system of socialism exhibits all of the qualities of the tragedy of the commons. We waste huge amounts of water. Our system of water consumption often leads to large amounts of water pollution that must be cleaned at the public expense. Some of the largest water projects in the West can largely be seen as a subsidy to big businesses, and these businesses in no way pay their share in taxes to compensate the rest of us. The South and East largely subsidized the West and Southwest in building an infrastructure of water socialism, and this has contributed to a political shift away from Eastern cities and the industrial sector. The West and Southwest call themselves 'rugged individualists and yet their whole way of life is based upon federal water projects. This is rarely if ever acknowledged. The absurdity of our system of water socialism can be seen in a desert city such as Las Vegas, one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S., which is spread across waterless land under a burning sun, with suburban style grasslawns soaking up water at a fast clip, all to support an adult entertainment industry based on gambling. The specific contradiction or the U.S. form of water socialism arises from the fact, that in order for any form of socialism to continue in the U.S. it must largely benefit the rich and powerful. Here is the true tragedy of the commons, but stated in a way that is not usually acknowledged by right-wing economists.

Historically, water socialism in the U.S. arose at times of the revolution of rapid urbanization and later suburbanization. These were also times when groups of elites had to compete with each other for political support from the multitude. The history of water in New York City, and the tremendous system of underground tunnels from upstate reservoirs, is an example of how one elite group opposed to another, competing for middle class and working class support, was able to establish the water infrastructure of an imperial city. It is, by the way, one of those rarely studied facts of history that all great imperial cities have been based on one form or another of collectivization of water. The great water projects in many cases arose in the same way that they did in New York, from elite competition to gain support of the masses. The best example is, of course, Rome during the ancient Republic. But another example is the New Deal attempt to extend New York City type water projects to the whole of the U.S., and to also apply the idea of water socialism to electricity. Most sunbelt rugged individualists, those who hate government intervention, those who think that Federal welfare is evil, would be living without a sure water supply, and without electricity, but for the projects of the federal government that led to a distributed water supply and to rural electrification.

The U.S. system of water socialism, for all of its failings is largely a success. Edmund Wilson, once said that one of the great cultural advances of all times is the American bathroom. I believe this is true. Water socialism makes this great human comfort of indoor plumbing possible. Note that the possibility of indoor plumbing in effect created the modern U.S. real estate industry and thus, indirectly, the modern banking system. It is a simple historical fact that without our system of water socialism the most vibrant aspects of U.S. "capitalism" (so-called), would not exist. Further without water socialism all but the well off people would go through everyday life working and planning to obtain enough water to live.

Given the success (and the reasons for the few failures) of water socialism in the U.S. is it any wonder that most academics who write about politics, economics, and law simply ignore the lessons of the history and administration of water, especially drinking water? They only concentrate on issues of pollution, important issues no doubt, but an issue that leads to skewed conclusions about the tragedy of the commons. In our society, when intellectual elites are confronted with a successful example of socialism they will only concentrate on the tragedy of the commons and never on the success of social planning as opposed to the market..

That is why it was nice to see an attempt to look into the history of water as relates to law. James Saltzman, who from reading his papers I surmise would not agree with my politics, has begun "an ongoing book project on the history of drinking water," a project that should be watched. One of the first entries of this project is called Thirst: A Short History of Drinking Water. I recommend this paper.

Below I provide a quote.

Drinking water is most obviously a physical resource, one of the few truly essential requirements for life. Regardless of the god you worship or the color of your skin, if you go without water for three days in an arid environment your life is in danger. And water’s physical characteristics confound easy management. Water is heavy – it is difficult to move uphill. Water is unwieldy – it cannot be packed or contained easily. And drinking water is fragile – it easily becomes contaminated and unfit for consumption. Drinking water is also a cultural resource, of religious significance in many societies. A social resource, access to water reveals much about membership in society. A political resource, the provision of water to citizens can serve important communication purposes. And finally, when scarce, water can become an economic resource.

As the Cochabamba [Bolivia, where a consortium led by Bechtel attempted to privatize water delivery] experience makes clear, managing and mediating these many facets of drinking water is no easy matter. Understanding a society’s ability to provide clean drinking water to its citizens, examining how it recognizes the different natures of this vital resource, provides a unique prism on the society’s organization, equity, and view of itself. In seeking to understand better how societies manage such a critical resource, this article considers three questions.

• How have different societies thought about drinking water?
• How have different societies managed access to drinking water?
• How have these changed over time?

These questions are, of course, interrelated. How we think of water, whether as a sacred gift or a good for sale, both influences and is influenced by how we manage access to drinking water. When management of drinking water fails to reflect popular conceptions and expectations, pressures for transition to a new management regime increase. And, as we saw in Cochabamba, when the new management regime fails to respect popular conceptions and expectations, it will fail.

Asking such questions may seem odd to an American environmental lawyer, for we tend to assume the presence of drinking water and focus on its quality rather than its natures as a resource; we tend to think in terms of quality rather than quantity. There is a vast literature on drinking water treatment, sources of water pollution, and drinking water standards, for example, yet relatively little on how we manage the resource, itself. To be sure, much thought has been dedicated to the problems of groundwater depletion and rivers that no longer run to the sea, but not because of drinking water concerns.

Compared to irrigation water, domestic use is a trickling afterthought. And even within the category of domestic use, much less water is used for drinking than for clothes washing, baths/showers, toilet flushing, or watering the lawn. In many parts of the world and for much of human history, however, drinking water quality has been only one of the basic challenges in managing this vital resource. While not an obvious issue to us in 21st century America, management of drinking water as a resource – who gets it, when they get it, and how much they get – matters a great
deal.

Finally, it must be said that our unique system of water socialism is denied to most people in the world today. There are historical and cultural reasons for this. Some of these reasons are indigenous and some international. Some have to do with the fact that during the period of urbanization, often forced urbanization, these areas of the world were dominated by distant empires. Today neo-liberal economic policies contribute to the failure of governments to build a working water infrastructure. In the great city of Rio de Janeiro for instance there is bottled water for the rich and dirty water for everyone else. As Saltzman states:

The facts of drinking water in the developing world are both straightforward and daunting. Over one billion people do not have access to even a basic water supply. Well over two billion people lack adequate sanitation. As a result, approximately half of the developing world inhabitants suffer from illnesses caused by contaminated water supplies. Many environment ministers consider this the single greatest threat to their people.

The contrast with developing countries could not be starker. Neither water quality nor quantity can be assumed. Because water supply infrastructure is not provided in the poorest urban or in many rural areas, obtaining water is regarded as an individual or domestic responsibility. In contrast to the ease of turning on a faucet, lack of infrastructure means a high labor input as someone from the household (generally women and girls) must collect each day’s water, whether from a communal pond or well, a tanker, or kiosk. Less than half of the population in Africa lives within a 15-minute walk of a safe drinking water source.

I fear with the wearing down of working class solidarity in the U.S. we are heading for this kind of divided economy of water. If water is commodified by "capitalist" standards we will all lose. And this brings us to the fact that our water system is a form of bureaucratic socialism and not a form of democratic and libertarian socialism. Our water system should be a part of our public debate and consciousness and the infrastructure itself should be administered democratically by the workers. Making our system of water consumption and delivery more democratic is a goal that goes along with making all aspect of our society more democratic.

Postscript: Saltzman quotes Scott E. Masten, Prospects for Private Water Provision in Developing Countries: Lessons from 19th- Century America xx (draft),

“The role of waterworks in firefighting was also a major theme. First, water demands for firefighting meant that waterworks had to be much larger than otherwise, raising the fixed costs of water systems…Fire insurance companies as early as 1800 made provision for centralized water systems in their rates… In Houston, pressure for a municipal takeover of the city’s private waterworks erupted in 1886 after a fire destroyed an important cotton seed mill ‘while firemen stood by helplessly because the hydrants were dry.’”

From my knowledge of the class nature of water politics in New York City, I know that the real estate interests were those who were mostly in favor of a system of water management that would provide enough water pressure for firefighting. This was also part of the movement to privatize municipal agencies such as the Police and Fire Departments, both of which were at times "private" and remained, for quite a long time, centers for political power and corruption. Insurance companies and real estate interests realized that it made good economic sense to support great water projects. Such projects expanded their economic base and provided for stable expansion. Free drinking water for the masses and pressurized water supply for real estate stability (and, as a side argument, offering indoor comfort to the rich), was part of urban party politics at the turn of the century. The reason I point to this is that economists rarely pay attention to the fact that developing and maintaining the commons was historically essential to the creation of the possibility of markets, in this case the urban and suburban real estate market. Markets are always created and/or maintained by collective non-market processes and those markets would fall apart otherwise. I cannot think of exceptions.

Jerry Monaco
New York City
4 March 2006

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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Fresh Water Science

2006-03-13T07:06:00.000-08:00

Conservation Science >
Freshwater Science

Around the world, freshwater species and habitats are among the most endangered. Freshwater conservation planning recognizes the distinct nature of freshwater systems: the importance of dynamic hydrologic processes, of connectivity across multiple dimensions, and of threats that disproportionately affect aquatic systems.

In recognition of this urgent conservation need and special methodological considerations, WWF's Conservation Science Program is devoting increasing effort to freshwater projects at the global, continental, ecoregional and landscape scales.

Quick Links

Africa and Madagascar conservation assessment

Global lakes and wetlands database (GLWD)

Sourcebook (PDF, 7.0 MB)

At the global scale, we are completing a delineation of freshwater conservation units for the entire world and synthesizing biodiversity information for each unit. This companion to the Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World endeavor will be complete in 2006. Delineation of freshwater units is driven primarily by fish zoogeography, and freshwater fishes are the first taxonomic group for which we are synthesizing richness and endemism data. In collaboration with the National Geographic Society, freshwater science Fellow Zeb Hogan is undertaking a global assessment of the world's largest freshwater fish species, most of which are imperiled. We have also recently completed a new global lakes and wetlands database (GLWD), in partnership with the Center for Environmental Systems Research, University of Kassel, Germany. This database, which is freely available, will help to improve global assessments. Finally, we are in the process of completing a new global hydrographic dataset and toolkit, HydroSHEDS (Hydrological data and maps based on SHuttle Elevation Derivatives at multiple Scales), which will allow conservation planners and managers around the world to do basic hydrological mapping and analyses.

Our global project builds on several continental scale assessments. We have completed conservation assessments for Latin America and the Caribbean (PDF, 590k), North America, and Africa and Madagascar. These assessments contain detailed analyses of both biodiversity and threats, and they identify priority ecoregions based on the integration of these indexes. The ecoregion maps for Latin America and the Caribbean and North America are being updated as part of our global project.

At the ecoregional scale, we have provided technical support to the development of multiple biodiversity visions. Freshwater ecoregional efforts include work in the Amazon, Guianas, Congo, Mekong, and Niger basins (PDF, 204k), the Southeast United States, the Chihuahuan Desert, and Lake Malawi (PDF, 3.0 MB). We have combined lessons derived from many of these projects into a sourcebook (PDF, 7.0 MB) for those undertaking similar efforts in the future.

Because many of the world's most important freshwater systems are poorly known scientifically, much of our work involves developing tools and approaches for addressing those data gaps. For instance, we used global hydrological models to develop scenarios for the impacts of climate change on river flows in western Mongolia, to help inform decisions about future hydropower development. We have also coupled HydroSHEDS data with hydrologic models to delineate and classify sub-watersheds in the southwest Amazon headwaters, the Guianas, and the Mekong River basin.

Effective conservation planning around the world will require addressing key scientific questions. We have outlined these questions for freshwater systems in a paper that was published in the October 2002 issue of Conservation Biology. Working with partners, we have also addressed the effects of tilapia aquaculture on native freshwater biodiversity, the ways that conservation biology may inform integrated basin management, prospects for monitoring freshwater systems towards the 2010 targets, and the problem of overfishing in freshwaters. Please see the Conservation Science Program's publications page for a complete list of these and other papers.

The Conservation Science Program works in collaboration with WWF's Global Freshwater Programme for healthy freshwater systems. We also work with numerous partner organizations and researchers around the world. For more information about our freshwater science work, please send an inquiry to cspinfo@wwfus.org.

View the online presentation, "Ecoregion Conservation for Freshwater Systems: An Approach for Biodiversity Conservation at Large Scales".

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What is it like to be a bat? by Thomas Nagel

2006-03-12T11:04:00.000-08:00

What is it like to be a bat?

Thomas Nagel

[From The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974): 435-50.]

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction.¹ But the problems dealt with are those common to this type of reduction and other types, and what makes the mind-body problem unique, and unlike the water-H₂O problem or the Turing machine-IBM machine problem or the lightning-electrical discharge problem or the gene-DNA problem or the oak tree-hydrocarbon problem, is ignored.

Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern science. It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain. But philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different. This has led to the acceptance of implausible accounts of the mental largely because they would permit familiar kinds of reduction. I shall try to explain why the usual examples do not help us to understand the relation between mind and body—why, indeed, we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless. The most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena is very poorly understood. Most reductionist theories do not even try to explain it. And careful examination will show that no currently available concept of reduction is applicable to it. Perhaps a new theoretical form can be devised for the purpose, but such a solution, if it exists, lies in the distant intellectual future.

Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.

We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.² It is not analyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior—for similar reasons.³ I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior, nor that they may be given functional characterizations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. With out some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of physicalist theory.

While an account of the physical basis of mind must explain many things, this appears to be the most difficult. It is impossible to exclude the phenomenological features of experience from a reduction in the same way that one excludes the phenomenal features of an ordinary substance from a physical or chemical reduction of it—namely, by explaining them as effects on the minds of human observers.⁴ If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character it seems that such a result is impossible. The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.

Let me first try to state the issue somewhat more fully than by referring to the relation between the subjective and the objective, or between the pour-soi and the en-soi. This is far from easy. Facts about what it is like to be an X are very peculiar, so peculiar that some may be inclined to doubt their reality, or the significance of claims about them. To illustrate the connection between subjectivity and a point of view, and to make evident the importance of subjective features, it will help to explore the matter in relation to an example that brings out clearly the divergence between the two types of conception, subjective and objective.

I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case,⁵ and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.

To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like.

So if extrapolation from our own case is involved in the idea of what it is like to be a bat, the extrapolation must be incompletable. We cannot form more than a schematic conception of what it is like. For example, we may ascribe general types of experience on the basis of the animal's structure and behavior. Thus we describe bat sonar as a form of three-dimensional forward perception; we believe that bats feel some versions of pain, fear, hunger, and lust, and that they have other, more familiar types of perception besides sonar. But we believe that these experiences also have in each case a specific subjective character, which it is beyond our ability to conceive. And if there's conscious life elsewhere in the universe, it is likely that some of it will not be describable even in the most general experiential terms available to us.⁶ (The problem is not confined to exotic cases, however, for it exists between one person and another. The subjective character of the experience of a person deaf and blind from birth is not accessible to me, for example, nor presumably is mine to him. This does not prevent us each from believing that the other's experience has such a subjective character.)

If anyone is inclined to deny that we can believe in the existence of facts like this whose exact nature we cannot possibly conceive, he should reflect that in contemplating the bats we are in much the same position that intelligent bats or Martians⁷ would occupy if they tried to form a conception of what it was like to be us. The structure of their own minds might make it impossible for them to succeed, but we know they would be wrong to conclude that there is not anything precise that it is like to be us: that only certain general types of mental state could be ascribed to us (perhaps perception and appetite would be concepts common to us both; perhaps not). We know they would be wrong to draw such a skeptical conclusion because we know what it is like to be us. And we know that while it includes an enormous amount of variation and complexity, and while we do not possess the vocabulary to describe it adequately, its subjective character is highly specific, and in some respects describable in terms that can be understood only by creatures like us. The fact that we cannot expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed description of Martian or bat phenomenology should not lead us to dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats and Martians have experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own. It would be fine if someone were to develop concepts and a theory that enabled us to think about those things; but such an understanding may be permanently denied to us by the limits of our nature. And to deny the reality or logical significance of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of cognitive dissonance.

This brings us to the edge of a topic that requires much more discussion than I can give it here: namely, the relation between facts on the one hand and conceptual schemes or systems of representation on the other. My realism about the subjective domain in all its forms implies a belief in the existence of facts beyond the reach of human concepts. Certainly it is possible for a human being to believe that there are facts which humans never will possess the requisite concepts to represent or comprehend. Indeed, it would be foolish to doubt this, given the finiteness of humanity's expectations. After all there would have been transfinite numbers even if everyone had been wiped out by the Black Death before Cantor discovered them. But one might also believe that there are facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by human beings, even if the species lasted for ever—simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type. This impossibility might even be observed by other beings, but it is not clear that the existence of such beings, or the possibility of their existence, is a precondition of the significance of the hypothesis that there are humanly inaccessible facts. (After all, the nature of beings with access to humanly inaccessible facts is presumably itself a humanly inaccessible fact.) Reflection on what it is like to be a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language. We can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without being able to state or comprehend them.

I shall not pursue this subject, however. Its bearing on the topic before us (namely, the mind-body problem) is that it enables us to make a general observation about the subjective character of experience. Whatever may be the status of facts about what it is like to be a human being, or a bat, or a Martian, these appear to be facts that embody a particular point of view.

I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type. It is often possible to take up a point of view other than one's own, so the comprehension of such facts is not limited to one's own case. There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other's experience is. They are subjective, however, in the sense that even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view—to understand the ascription in the first person as well as in the third, so to speak. The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with this enterprise. In our own case we occupy the relevant point of view, but we will have as much difficulty understanding our own experience properly if we approach it from another point of view as we would if we tried to understand the experience of another species without taking up its point of view.⁸

This bears directly on the mind-body problem. For if the facts of experience—facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism—are accessible only from one point of view, then it is a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism. The latter is a domain of objective facts par excellence—the kind that can be observed and understood from many points of view and by individuals with differing perceptual systems. There are no comparable imaginative obstacles to the acquisition of knowledge about bat neurophysiology by human scientists, and intelligent bats or Martians might learn more about the human brain than we ever will.

This is not by itself an argument against reduction. A Martian scientist with no understanding of visual perception could understand the rainbow, or lightning, or clouds as physical phenomena, though he would never be able to understand the human concepts of rainbow, lightning, or cloud, or the place these things occupy in our phenomenal world. The objective nature of the things picked out by these concepts could be apprehended by him because, although the concepts themselves are connected with a particular point of view and a particular visual phenomenology, the things apprehended from that point of view are not: they are observable-from the point of view but external to it; hence they can be comprehended from other points of view also, either by the same organisms or by others. Lightning has an objective character that is not exhausted by its visual appearance, and this can be investigated by a Martian without vision. To be precise, it has a more objective character than is revealed in its visual appearance. In speaking of the move from subjective to objective characterization, I wish to remain noncommittal about the existence of an end point, the completely objective intrinsic nature of the thing, which one might or might not be able to reach. It may be more accurate to think of objectivity as a direction in which the understanding can travel. And in understanding a phenomenon like lightning, it is legitimate to go as far away as one can from a strictly human viewpoint.⁹

In the case of experience, on the other hand, the connection with a particular point of view seems much closer. It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat? But if experience does not have, in addition to its subjective character, an objective nature that can be apprehended from many different points of view, then how can it be supposed that a Martian investigating my brain might be observing physical processes which were my mental processes (as he might observe physical processes which were bolts of lightning), only from a different point of view? How, for that matter, could a human physiologist observe them from another point of view?¹⁰

We appear to be faced with a general difficulty about psychophysical reduction. In other areas the process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more, accurate view of the real nature of things. This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation. We describe it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human senses. The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. It is possible to follow this path because although the concepts and ideas we employ in thinking about the external world are initially applied from a point of view that involves our perceptual apparatus, they are used by us to refer to things beyond themselves—toward which we have the phenomenal point of view. Therefore we can abandon it in favor of another, and still be thinking about the same things.

Experience itself however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favour of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.

In a sense, the seeds of this objection to the reducibility of experience are already detectable in successful cases of reduction; for in discovering sound to be, in reality, a wave phenomenon in air or other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up another, and the auditory, human or animal viewpoint that we leave behind remains unreduced. Members of radically different species may both understand the same physical events in objective terms, and this does not require that they understand the phenomenal forms in which those events appear to the senses of members of the other species. Thus it is a condition of their referring to a common reality that their more particular viewpoints are not part of the common reality that they both apprehend. The reduction can succeed only if the species-specific viewpoint is omitted from what is to be reduced.

But while we are right to leave this point of view aside in seeking a fuller understanding of the external world, we cannot ignore it permanently, since it is the essence of the internal world, and not merely a point of view on it. Most of the neobehaviorism of recent philosophical psychology results from the effort to substitute an objective concept of mind for the real thing, in order to have nothing left over which cannot be reduced. If we acknowledge that a physical theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience, we must admit that no presently available conception gives us a clue how this could be done. The problem is unique. If mental processes are indeed physical processes, then there is something it is like, intrinsically,¹¹ to undergo certain physical processes. What it is for such a thing to be the case remains a mystery.

What moral should be drawn from these reflections, and what should be done next? It would be a mistake to conclude that physicalism must be false. Nothing is proved by the inadequacy of physicalist hypotheses that assume a faulty objective analysis of mind. It would be truer to say that physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true. Perhaps it will be thought unreasonable to require such a conception as a condition of understanding. After all, it might be said, the meaning of physicalism is clear enough: mental states are states of the body; mental events are physical events. We do not know which physical states and events they are, but that should not prevent us from understanding the hypothesis. What could be clearer than the words 'is' and 'are'?

But I believe it is precisely this apparent clarity of the word 'is' that is deceptive. Usually, when we are told that X is Y we know how it is supposed to be true, but that depends on a conceptual or theoretical background and is not conveyed by the 'is' alone. We know how both "X" and "Y " refer, and the kinds of things to which they refer, and we have a rough idea how the two referential paths might converge on a single thing, be it an object, a person, a process, an event or whatever. But when the two terms of the identification are very disparate it may not be so clear how it could be true. We may not have even a rough idea of how the two referential paths could converge, or what kind of things they might converge on, and a theoretical framework may have to be supplied to enable us to understand this. Without the framework, an air of mysticism surrounds the identification.

This explains the magical flavor of popular presentations of fundamental scientific discoveries, given out as propositions to which one must subscribe without really understanding them. For example, people are now told at an early age that all matter is really energy. But despite the fact that -'they know what 'is' means, most of them never form a conception of what makes this claim true, because they lack the theoretical background.

At the present time the status of physicalism is similar to that which the hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a pre-Socratic philosopher. We do not have the beginnings of a conception of how it might be true. In order to understand the hypothesis that a mental event is a physical event, we require more than an understanding of the word 'is'. The idea of how a mental and a physical term might refer to the same thing is lacking, and the usual analogies with theoretical identification in other fields fail to supply it. They fail because if we construe the reference of mental terms to physical events on the usual model, we either get a reappearance of separate subjective events as the effects through which mental reference to physical events is secured, or else we get a false account of how mental terms refer (for example, a causal behaviorist one).

Strangely enough, we may have evidence for the truth of something we cannot really understand. Suppose a caterpillar is locked in a sterile safe by someone unfamiliar with insect metamorphosis, and weeks later the safe is reopened, revealing a butterfly. If the person knows that the safe has been shut the whole time, he has reason to believe that the butterfly is or was once the caterpillar, without having any idea in what sense this might be so. (One possibility is that the caterpillar contained a tiny winged parasite that devoured it and grew into the butterfly.)

It is conceivable that we are in such a position with regard to physicalism. Donald Davidson has argued that if mental events have physical causes and effects, they must have physical descriptions. He holds that we have reason to believe this even though we do not—and in fact could not—have a general psychophysical theory.¹² His argument applies to intentional mental events, but I think we also have some reason to believe that sensations are physical processes, without being in a position to understand how. Davidson's position is that certain physical events have irreducibly mental properties, and perhaps some view describable in this way is correct. But nothing of which we can now form a conception corresponds to it; nor have we any idea what a theory would be like that enabled us to conceive of it.¹³

Very little work has been done on the basic question (from which mention of the brain can be entirely omitted) whether any sense can be made of experiences' having an objective character at all. Does it make sense, in other words, to ask what my experiences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me? We cannot genuinely understand the hypothesis that their nature is captured in a physical description unless we understand the more fundamental idea that they have an objective nature (or that objective processes can have a subjective nature).¹⁴

I should like to close with a speculative proposal. It may be possible to approach the gap between subjective and objective from another direction. Setting aside temporarily the relation between the mind and the brain, we can pursue a more objective understanding of the mental in its own right. At present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without relying on the imagination—without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject. This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method—an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination. Though presumably it would not capture everything, its goal would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences.

We would have to develop such a phenomenology to describe the sonar experiences of bats; but it would also be possible to begin with humans. One might try, for example, to develop concepts that could be used to explain to a person blind from birth what it was like to see. One would reach a blank wall eventually, but it should be possible to devise a method of expressing in objective terms much more than we can at present, and with much greater precision. The loose intermodal analogies—for example, 'Red is like the sound of a trumpet'—which crop up in discussions of this subject are of little use. That should be clear to anyone who has both heard a trumpet and seen red. But structural features of perception might be more accessible to objective description, even though something would be left out. And concepts alternative to those we learn in the first person may enable us to arrive at a kind of understanding even of our own experience which is denied us by the very ease of description and lack of distance that subjective concepts afford.

Apart from its own interest, a phenomenology that is in this sense objective may permit questions about the physically basis of experience to assume a more intelligible form. Aspects of subjective experience that admitted this kind of objective description might be better candidates for objective explanations of a more familiar sort. But whether or not this guess is correct, it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind-body problem without sidestepping it.

NOTES:

¹ Examples are J. J. C. Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Realism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963); David K. Lewis, 'An Argument for the Identity Theory', Journal of Philosophy, LXIII (1966), reprinted with addenda in David M. Rosenthal, Materialism & the Mind-Body Problem, (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1971); Hilary Putnam, 'Psychological Predicates', in Art, Mind, & Religion, ed. W. H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), reprinted in Materialism, ed. Rosenthal, as 'The Nature of Mental States'; D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968); D. C. Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). I have expressed earlier doubts in 'Armstrong on the Mind', Philosophical Review, LXXIX (1970), 394-403; a review of Dennett, Journal of Philosophy, LXIX (1972); and chapter 11 above. See also Saul Kripke, 'Naming and Necessity'. in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. D. Davidson and G. Harman (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), esp. pp. 334-42; and M. T. Thornton, 'Ostensive Terms and Materialism', The Monist, LVI (1972), 193-214.

² Perhaps there could not actually be such robots. Perhaps anything complex enough to behave like a person would have experiences. But that, if true, is a fact which cannot be discovered merely by analyzing the concept of experience.

³ It is not equivalent to that about which we are incorrigible, both because we are not incorrigible about experience and because experience is present in animals lacking language and thought, who have no beliefs at all about their experiences.

⁴ Cf. Richard Rorty, 'Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories', Review of Metaphysics, XIX (1965), esp. 37-8.

⁵By 'our own case' I do not mean just 'my own case', but rather the mentalistic ideas that we apply unproblematically to ourselves and other human beings.

⁶Therefore the analogical form of the English expression 'what it is like' is misleading. It does not mean 'what (in our experience) it resembles', but rather 'how it is for the subject himself'.

⁷Any intelligent extraterrestrial beings totally different from us.

⁸ It may be easier than I suppose to transcend inter-species barriers with the aid of the imagination. For example, blind people are able to detect objects near them by a form of sonar, using vocal clicks or taps of a cane. Perhaps if one knew what that was like, one could by extension imagine roughly what it was like to possess the much more refined sonar of a bat. The distance between oneself and other persons and other species can fall anywhere on a continuum. Even for other persons the understanding of what it is like to be them is only partial, and when one moves to species very different from oneself, a lesser degree of partial understanding may still be available. The imagination is remarkably flexible. My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. I am not raising that epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat (and a fortiori to know what it is like to be a bat) one must take up the bat's point of view. If one can take it up roughly, or partially, then one's conception will also be rough or partial. Or so it seems in our present state of understanding.

⁹ The problem I am going to raise can therefore be posed even if the distinction between more subjective and more objective descriptions or viewpoints can itself be made only within a larger human point of view. I do not accept this kind of conceptual relativism, but it need not be refuted to make the point that psychophysical reduction cannot be accommodated by the subjective-to-objective model from other cases.

¹⁰ The problem is not just that when I look at the Mona Lisa, my visual experience has a certain quality, no trace of which is to be found by someone looking into my brain. For even if he did observe there a tiny image of the Mona Lisa, he would have no reason to identify it with the experience.

¹¹ The relation would therefore not be a contingent one, like that of a cause and its distinct effect. It would be necessarily true that a physical state felt a certain way. Saul Kripke in Semantics of Natural Language, (ed. Davidson and Harman) argues that causal behaviorist and related analyses of the mental fail because they construe, e.g., 'pain' as a merely contingent name of pains. The subjective character of an experience ('its immediate phenomenolocal quality' Kripke calls it (p. 340)) is the essential property left out by such analyses, and the one in virtue of which it is, necessarily, the experience it is. My view is closely related to his. Like Kripke, I find the hypothesis that a certain brain state should necessarily have a certain subjective character incomprehensible without further explanation. No such explanation emerges from theories which view the mind-brain relation as contingent, but perhaps there are other alternatives, not yet discovered.

A theory that explained how the mind-brain relation was necessary would still leave us with Kripke's problem of explaining why it nevertheless appears contingent. That difficulty seems to me surmountable, in the following way. We may imagine something by representing it to ourselves either perceptually, sympathetically, or symbolically. I shall not try to say how symbolic imagination works, but part of what happens in the other two cases is this. To imagine something perceptually, we put ourselves in a conscious state resembling the state we would be in if we perceived it. To imagine something sympathetically, we put ourselves in a conscious state resembling the thing itself. (This method can be used only to imagine mental events and stares—our own or another's.) When we try to imagine a mental state occurring without its associated brain state, we first sympathetically imagine the occurrence of the mental state: that is, we put ourselves into a state that resembles it mentally. At the same time, we attempt perceptually to imagine the nonoccurrence of the associated physical state, by putting ourselves into another state unconnected with the first; one resembling that which we would be in if we perceived the nonoccurrence of the physical state. Where the imagination of physical features is perceptual and the imagination of mental features is sympathetic, it appears to us that we can imagine any experience occurring without its associated brain state, and vice versa. The relation between them will appear contingent even if it is necessary, because of the independence of the disparate types of imagination.

(Solipsism incidentally, results if one misinterprets sympathetic imagination as if it worked like perceptual imagination: it then seems impossible to imagine any experience that is not one's own.)

¹² See 'Mental Events' in Experience and Theory, ed. Lawrence Foster and J. W. Swanson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970); though I do not understand the argument against psychophysical laws.

¹³Similar remarks apply to my paper 'Physicalism', Philosophical Review, LXXIV (1965), 339-56, reprinted with postscript in Modern Materialism, ed. John O'Connor (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969).

¹⁴ This question also lies at the heart of the problem of other minds, whose close connection with the mind-body problem is often overlooked. If one understood how subjective experience could have an objective nature, one would understand the existence of subjects other than oneself.

¹⁵ I have not defined the term 'physical'. Obviously it does not apply just to what can be described by the concepts of contemporary physics, since we expect further developments. Some may think there is nothing to prevent mental phenomena from eventually being recognized as physical in their own right. But whatever else may be said of the physical, it has to be objective. So if our idea of the physical ever expands to include mental phenomena, it will have to assign them an objective character—whether or not this is done by analyzing them in terms of other phenomena already regarded as physical It seems to me more likely, however, that mental-physical relations will eventually be expressed in a theory whose fundamental terms cannot be placed clearly in either category.

Doing Without What’s Within; Fiona Cowie’s Critique of Nativism

2006-03-12T10:57:00.000-08:00

Doing Without What’s Within; Fiona Cowie’s Critique of Nativism

by Jerry Fodor

Rutgers University

This is not a cry for help, Lady; this is a stick-up.
(Caption of a New Yorker cartoon)

PROLOGUE: How on earth did this paper get so long?
I started with no goal more ambitious than a critical discussion of Fiona Cowie’s new book about innateness; ¹it seemed to me that her arguments, unless refuted in detail, were likely to affront some or other abstract entity whose cause I favor: The Good, The True, The Beautiful; whatever. But there were so many things that the book struck me as being wrong about that the proposed critique became, in effect, an explication of the kind of nativism I think a rationalist in cognitive psychology should endorse. And the more of that I came to explicate, the more digressions and elaborations suggested themselves. And elaborations of the digressions. And digressions from the elaborations. Things commenced to be out of hand.
A quandary. But one of which an appropriately Gilbertian solution (see `Iolanthe’, Act 2) occurred to me: Construe the project to be mainly an exposition of the kind of nativism that I think a rationalist in cognitive psychology should endorse; and construe the critique of Cowie’s book to be mostly digressions and elaborations. Voila!
The result is before you.

PART 1: Introduction.

Do you want to know how to tell when you have gotten old? It’s when a cyclical theory of history starts to strike you as plausible. It begins to seem that the same stuff keeps coming around again, just like Hegel said. Except that it’s not “transcended and preserved”; it’s just back. So, associationism is back (see Elman et al 1996; for an unsympathetic review, see Fodor 1998b), and likewise the ancient argument about innate ideas. Cowie’s resurrection of the nativism controversy, just when I’d begun to hope that its recent demise might prove permanent, will be the topic in what follows. I’d be glad to report that something new has happened; but, as it turns out, the polemics are almost all familiar. As far as I can tell, it’s just the Eternal Recurrence recurring. I think I must have gotten old.
Cowie claims to rebut arguments for nativism that Noam Chomsky and I have from time to time endorsed. I don’t, in fact, think that she has done so; but then I wouldn’t, would I? Since my sense of what’s the bottom line on all of this is, pretty clearly, preconceived, ---and since I’d guess that yours may be too--- I won’t attempt to change your mind about innateness. But I do want to claim, at length, that if the problems that Chomsky and I have to worry about are only the ones that Cowie’s book raises, then at worst we’re as well off now as we were before she wrote it. Nothing has changed because, quite uniformly, the arguments Cowie has on offer either misconceive the issues or are, in crucial respects, unsound. Or both. So, anyhow, I hope now to convince you.
Cowie’s book has three main sections. The first is her exegesis of considerations that prompt the nativist position (specifically on first language acquisition, but implicitly on cognition at large.) These Cowie takes to be: `Poverty of Stimulus Arguments’ (often hereinafter POSAs), and `Impossibility Arguments’ (hereinafter sometimes IAs.) The second and third sections are devoted to criticisms of these arguments, set out in reverse of the order I’ve just mentioned. Except for this reordering, my plan is basically to track the book.

1.1 The polemical situation according to Cowie: Let’s start with a way of viewing the rationalism/empiricism debate that Cowie flirts with but doesn’t in the end endorse; namely “that nativism ---or empiricism, for that matter, is nothing at all… [and] the great controversy over innate ideas is not worth the paper it’s written on… (p. 25)” Eventually Cowie rejects this view since, of course, it can’t both be that the argument about innateness was empty and that the empiricists won it. But Cowie is prone to phrase this `no contest’ reading in ways that suggest invidious asymmetries. For example “The difficulty, in other words, is that the assertion of nativism often seems to be merely the denial of empiricism. And if that is so, then nativism is not a theory of the mind at all; it signifies merely our lack of such a theory.(25)”. Take home exercise: try rewriting this passage replacing `nativism’ with `empiricism’ and `empiricism’ with `nativism’ throughout. Notice that it works equally well (or badly) either way. That’s because, prior to examining particulars, the polemical situation between rationalists and empiricists is really entirely symmetrical: Nativism is merely the denial of empiricism insofar as we lack a way of saying what `innate’ comes to other than not learned. Likewise, empiricism is merely the denial of nativism insofar as we lack a way of saying what `learned’ comes to other than not innate.
But it doesn’t follow, as Cowie sometimes seems to suppose it must, that empiricism and nativism were tacitly interdefined in the traditional debate; so that, for example, “[the nature/nurture argument] is a battle that is largely fought over, and with, metaphors… [which only] mask the absence of substantive disagreement (17).” It’s worth getting straight, before we plunge into deeper waters, on how the argument could have been fruitful, and the issue substantive (as both clearly were and continue to be) if nobody had any very definite idea what either innateness or learning amounts to.
The metaphors, parade examples, agreed cases and such, in terms of which the issues were largely framed, didn’t “mask” anything; indeed, they were just what made it possible for illuminating discussions to proceed. What happened, unsurprisingly, was that each side elaborated its claims largely by reference to plausible paradigm examples; for the nativists, these included (eg.) bird song, skin color, and the Classical reflex. Their claim was that, when the dust settled, cognition (including learning, perception, memory and thought) would be seen to resemble phenomena like those a lot more than it does such empiricist paradigms as rote learning, verbal association, and the Instrumental reflex. I say this is unsurprising because science often starts in media res, finding out what it’s `really` about as it goes along, thereby discovering the essences of issues.
However, that way of proceeding implies a kind of inductive risk: the danger that the paradigm cases, reference to which defines the common ground of argument, may turn out not to be paradigms of anything. In particular, they may not all exemplify the same natural kind. If so, then the issues have to be framed some other way, or dropped. On both sides of the traditional debate, questions about innateness were widely run together with, for example, questions about a prioricity, necessity, the existence of God and the warrant of moral principles. But despite such conflations, it appears in retrospect that the argument really was about something ---some one thing--- after all: It was about whether there is a characteristic human psychological phenotype (`human nature’ in earlier editions) that can be attributed to a characteristic human genetic endowment.
The constellation of notions that cluster around `genetic determination’, `genome’ `genotype’ and the rest are, to be sure, themselves adequately contentious. But I suppose nobody sensible denies that they are now deeply scientifically entrenched, or that biology is in the process of constructing a concept of genetic specification that is likely to save many of the rationalists’ paradigms. Skin color really is largely innate (/heritable/genetically determined), much as everyone had hazily supposed. Likewise birdsong in a lot of cases; likewise the Babinsky Reflex. And it seems unlikely that the notion of innateness according to which such claims are true will prove dispensable for the larger purposes of biology. Mendel was, presumably, right about something; presumably what he was right about was the genetic transmission of the phenotypic traits he studied. We have, in short, good reason to take for granted that there’s a substantive notion of innateness because biology needs one however the rationalism/empiricism issue turns out.
I’m going on about this since it’s not at all the view of the polemical situation that Cowie’s exegesis suggests. As she appears to see it, the burden is on nativists to say exactly what doctrine they’re endorsing, thereby avoiding the trivialization of their side of the classical debate. This burden Cowie, in all kindness, offers to take up on the nativist’s behalf; she proposes, as she puts it, to “…find some substance for the nativism debate… to be about. I argue that there are in fact, two substantive issues over which nativists and empiricists clash.” The one with which Cowie takes POSAs to be most involved “concerns the natural architecture of the mind: Has nature equipped us with general-purpose, or domain-specifc, learning devices?” The other, which Cowie takes to be what’s at issue in IAs, concerns “the scope [and limits] of natural science: what are our prospects for domesticating the mind and locating it within our overall scientific world view. (26).”

But even this early in the exposition, it seems something has gone badly wrong with Cowie’s geography. For, it’s hard to believe that a serious reconstruction of the argument about whether there are innate ideas could miss the point that it was an argument about whether there are innate ideas; hence, presumably not (or, anyhow, not in the first instance) about whether there are special purpose learning mechanisms, or whether there’s a place for the mind in the scientific world view. These latter issues belong, respectively, to the psychology of learning, and to metaphysics; neither sounds much like asking what ideas are innate. Likewise, as we’ll see presently, neither is what IAs or POSAs are about.
There is also a deeper objection to Cowie’s initial framing of the issues; it’s my excuse for taking this long way `round getting started. Suppose it’s agreed that, as things have turned out, the argument between rationalists and empiricists was `really’ about whether, or to what extent, a species-characteristic human psychological phenotype is genetically specified. That would, as I remarked, vindicate the rationalists’ claim to have all along been holding a substantive view; one that the advance of microbiology now promises to explicate. But no such appeal would vindicate the empiricist side of the debate. So an empiricist still needs what neither Chomsky nor I believe him to have: an independent characterization of “learned”; one that doesn’t amount to just the denial of “innate”.
It is, I think, a remarkable feature of Cowie’s exegesis that she never considers the question what, if anything, learning is. To the contrary, remarks like the following are characteristic: “I do not regard it as in any way destructive of my position or arguments… that I do not have on hand any worked-out alternative to the Chomskyan picture of language acquisition (272)” “Humans learn an awful lot, about a bewildering variety of topics… that they can do so… is miraculous and mysterious (216)”. ²Well, Cowie is right that you don’t need a `worked out [empiricism] …on hand’ to deny that nativism is true. But what you do need if you are proposing empiricism as an alternative to nativism (learning as an alternative to innateness) is some reason to suppose that your paradigm cases of learning are indeed mostly paradigms of the same thing. The thoroughly modern rationalist finds in genetics a science where notions like innateness are entrenched. What offers empiricists the corresponding encouragement? There is, after all, no program of research except empiricist psychology that makes play with the notions that cluster around learning. So why (other than a prior commitment to the empiricist program) should one believe that there is any such thing? Empiricists really do have what Cowie takes to be the nativist’s proprietary problem: How to say what they’re endorsing except that it’s not what they’re rejecting. So the question really does arise whether there is a substantive empiricist position for nativists to argue against.
However, what I just said isn’t true. There is, in fact, a sketch theory that purports to provide some idea of what being learned might amount to beside being not innate; which is all one could reasonably demand of an empiricism that is itself in media res. Learning might be association; correspondingly, being acquired by association formation (i.e. by processes that satisfy the laws of association) might be the property that makes most or all of the empiricist’s paradigms instances of learning. It’s thus not an historical accident that empiricists have been, pretty much without exception, associationists as well. Nor is it an accident that, empiricism now being back, associationism is back too.
But, of course, associationism isn’t true; it is, and always has been, an intellectual disaster. Perhaps you don’t agree? Even so, for present purposes, please do suspend your disbelief. It’s fair for me to ask you to do so, because (to her credit) Cowie isn’t an associationist. (She makes occasional references to connectionism as possibly an alternative to Chomsky’s rationalism; but they are guarded and far from an endorsement). I won’t, therefore, digress to rehearse the standard anti-associationist arguments. Suffice it that there is a cost to Cowie for thus exempting herself from the traditional empiricist-associationist alliance. It’s not just that she is left with no `worked out’ psychology of learning (etc.) An empiricist who’s not also an associationist has no cognitive psychology on offer at all; only the hope that his favorite paradigm cases of not-innateness will prove to be all of a (natural) kind. That does not count as a theory of mind; or even as a properly mongered mystery. At most it’s a propositional attitude in search of an intentional object.
Among Cowie’s recurrent themes is that, whereas impossibility argument nativists (like me) have no positive learning theory on offer, it’s characteristic of empiricists to propose real, testable models of how cognition is achieved. That, however, is true only of empiricists who are also associationists, and it’s true of them in virtue of their associationism, not of their empiricism. If it’s read just as the thesis that very little that’s intentional is unlearned, empiricism offers no positive account of how the mind works. Nor, likewise, does rationalism if it’s read just as the thesis that there’s lots intentional that’s unlearned. What you do to get an honest to God psychology out of empiricism is add the thesis that mental processes are associative; what you do to get an honest to God psychology out of rationalism is add the thesis that mental processes are computational. In principle, the situation between rationalism and empiricism with respect to whether they offer positive psychological theories is thus exactly symmetrical (just like the situation between them with respect to whether they offer positive accounts of the distinction learned/innate, and for the same reasons; see above.) De facto, however, the current situation favors the rationalists since, whereas associationism is certainly false, computationalism might actually be (partly) true. (For which part of it might be, see Fodor (2000.))
But, having thus objected to the way Cowie sets the pieces out, I propose now to waive all further such complaints. As it turns out, most of Cowie’s book floats free of her general analysis of the rationalism/empiricism dispute; mostly it’s about the status of POSAs and IAs, her main thesis being that neither are convincing. So let’s turn to that. I’ll start by considering what Cowie takes it that IAs and POSAs are supposed by their proponents to show. Then I’ll discuss Cowie’s reasons for holding that neither kind of argument is sound. I claim, under the first head, that Cowie misconstrues the conclusions of IAs and POSAs. I claim, under the second head, that although Cowie misreads both POSA and IAs, her doing so doesn’t really matter much. That’s because the objections she raises against POSAs and IAs would be ill-founded even if the intended conclusions of these arguments were as Cowie believes.
What with one thing and another, this will amount to a lot of work in what I take to be the public interest. I do hope somebody is going to thank me for it when it’s over. Profusely, by preference.

PART 2: The Arguments.

2.1 What the arguments claim to show: Cowie observes that versions of POSAs and IAs have both been floating around for centuries, neither displacing the other as the flagship argument for nativism. She speculates that this is because their presumptive conclusions, though both incompatible with empiricism, are mutually independent. By contrast, though I do think Cowie is right that IAs and POSAs serve different polemical intentions, I think she’s got it utterly wrong what their conclusions are supposed to be. When that’s straightened out, they are seen not to be independent after all: Roughly, what follows from POSAs can’t be true unless what follows from the IAs is; but not vice versa.
In a nutshell, here’s how Cowie sees the situation. Insofar as he endorses POSAs, “the nativist’s claim that such and such mental item is innate… means that that item is acquired by means of a task-specific learning device.…” Cowie identifies this version of rationalism as having historical roots in Plato and Descartes; Chomsky, however, is its primary current proponent, and he’s the main target in Cowie’s discussion of POSAs. By contrast, according to Cowie, the conclusion of IA is not a thesis about (for example) language acquisition, but rather a kind of “methodological gloom” about naturalism. The nativism that emerges from IAs is just the claim that “…empiricist boasts to the contrary notwithstanding, we have no idea whatsoever how [an] item was acquired (67)”. ³ The historical affinities of this kind of nativism are, according to Cowie, largely with Leibniz and Descartes. However, it’s primary current proponent turns out to be ---of all people--- me.

But though it’s strikingly imaginative, Cowie’s account of what POSAs and IAs are supposed to show can’t be right. On the one hand, for reasons I’m about to try to make clear, it’s very implausible to read Chomsky as holding a thesis about acquisition devices (my emphasis); or, indeed, as holding much of a view about any of the mechanisms that mediate language behavior. On Chomsky’s way of seeing things, such matters fall in the domain of `performance theories,’ a term Chomsky generally uses with invidious intent. I’ve never actually asked him, but I’m prepared to bet a dime that Chomsky really thinks there can’t be serious performance theories, and that people who try to construct them are wasting time that they could much more profitably use studying syntax. If I’m right to read him that way, then that the intended conclusion of the POSAs isn’t about acquisition mechanisms, domain specific or otherwise. To the contrary, what Chomsky proposes is a nativism of domain specific propositional attitudes (= PAs), not a nativism of domain specific “devices.” More on this presently.
As to my view about IAs, I have introspected carefully and speak with first-person authority. I do not think they show ---or even suggest--- that naturalism is impossible. I am, to be sure, gloomy enough, metaphysically and otherwise; but not about the kinds of things, or for the kinds of reasons, that Cowie supposes. To the contrary, I am, perhaps more than anybody else I can think of who isn’t actually Australian, a crude, crass, vulgar, old fashioned, simple minded, positivistic Village Reductionist about (token, intentional) mental states. Indeed, I think that token reductionism is a substantive constraint that the scientific world view (or something) imposes on the ontology of all the special sciences; hence on psychology inter alia. I have suffered for thinking this: I have been repeatedly beaten around the head and shoulders by experts, including Tyler Burge, Steven Stich and, come to think of it, Noam Chomsky. But I have kept my ground, and I have not cried for help. That after such stoicism I should be accused of arguing that there can’t be a science of the mind… Well, really! I am seldom moved to exclamation points, but really!!! ⁴
So, then, what do the rationalists who propose them take to be the conclusions of POSAs and IAs respectively?
The bottom line of Poverty Of Stimulus Arguments, as Chomsky uses them, is that innate, domain specific information is normally recruited in first language acquisition. A nativism of domain specific information needn’t, of course, be incompatible with a nativism of domain specific acquisition mechanisms; in fact, people who are into `modular’ views of cognitive architecture generally (though by no means always; see, eg. Karmiloff Smith (1992)) hold both. But I want to emphasize that, given his understanding of POSAs, Chomsky can with perfect coherence claim that innate, domain specific PAs mediate language acquisition, while remaining entirely agnostic about the domain specificity of language acquisition mechanisms. Indeed, as far as I can tell, circa Aspects (1965) Chomsky pretty explicitly held to the soundness of POSAs; and to a nativism of propositional attitudes (he supposed Universal Grammar (=UG) to be innate); and to the view that language acquisition is implemented by some hypothesis formation/testing mechanism which could perfectly well be domain neutral for all anybody knows. According to my understanding of Chomsky’s understanding of POSAs, they raise the question whether the innate knowledge that language acquisition exploits is at the disposal of domain specific mechanisms. But they are not in themselves committed on how that question should be answered. Nor is the last word on this currently audible. ⁵
However, as previously remarked, the difference between the conclusions that Cowie thinks that Chomsky thinks that POSAs invite and the conclusions that Chomsky thinks that POSAs invite, doesn’t actually matter much in evaluating Cowies objections to POSAs. For, these are mostly arguments that the empirical premises of POSAs aren’t true; or, at a minimum, that there’s reason enough to doubt their truth that one can’t reasonably rely on POSAs whatever exactly their conclusion are supposed to be. But, though distinguishing between a nativism of mechanisms and a nativism of PAs isn’t essential to Cowie’s enterprise, it matters a lot to Chomsky’s. The point that’s involved here is really central to understanding how cognitivist explanations are supposed to work, and so merits one of those digressions.
Here’s how I think the geography goes: Chomsky wants it very much that coextensive, `descriptively adequate’ grammars can differ in truth value. ⁶^,⁷For example, given the way Chomsky has things set up, it could turn out that G1 and G2 are both descriptively adequate, but that G2 is unlearnable because it acknowledges rules that violate universals imposed by UG. Chomsky thus requires there to be a distinction between descriptive adequacy and truth as they apply to theories of language. He gets the distinction by assuming, on the one hand, that grammars are the intentional objects of certain of the speaker/hearer’s PAs (in particular, attitudes of `cognizing’; see below) and, on the other hand, that the intentional objects of PAs are ipso facto `internally represented’ as a matter of nomological or (maybe metaphysical) necessity. This is all he needs to explain why `G is the grammar of L’ is opaque to the substitution of descriptively adequate Gs. Because representations can differ even if their intentional contents do not, the assumed equivalence of G1 and G2 in respect of descriptive adequacy does not guarantee that if either is `psychologically real,’ then both are. And, by assumption, psychological reality is required for the truth of a linguistic theory. QED.
But you can’t, of course, run the parallel argument on psychological devices, mechanisms and the like. For, the distinction between truth and adequacy I just drew depends on assuming that, qua intentional, the objects of PAs are internally represented. But internal mechanisms aren’t (normally) internally represented; they’re just internal tout court. A fortiori, you can’t choose between equivalent theories of an internal mechanism by reference to how it is internally represented. So presumably there’s nothing to choose between equivalent theories of an internal mechanism; nothing, anyhow, that could distinguish between them in respect of truth. So, since it’s important to Chomsky that there can be an empirically motivated choice among equivalent grammars, it’s likewise important that his nativism is about propositional attitudes rather than mechanisms.
Not to attend to this aspect of the mechanism/attitude distinction is to miss exactly the point at which the notion of intentionality gets its grip on psychological explanation in Chomsky’s kind of theory. That would be a great shame whatever you think about rationalism and empiricism, since the ways it plays the notion of content off against the notions of representation and mechanism is, perhaps, the characteristic feature of contemporary cognitivist theorizing. So, then, to repeat: The intended conclusion of POSAs is that innate, domain specific PAs mediate language acquisition, not (pace Cowie) that innate domain specific devices do. It’s because Chomsky holds that the innate information available in the initial state of language acquisition is ipso facto among the intentional object of the learner’s propositional attitudes that Chomsky’s theory of mind is indeed continuous with the traditional rationalist postulation of innate ideas.

I’ll, for now, be very quick about what’s the intended conclusion of Impossibility Arguments; we’ll presently get to a story that’s more fine grained.

First, if they are sound, IAs imply that lots of concepts are innate. No doubt, among the lots of concepts that are innate if IAs are sound are probably lots of linguistic concepts (ones that express such grammatical properties of linguistic expressions as, for example, being a noun.) But so, according to impossibility arguments, are very many other concepts: TRIANGLE, for one example, and CARBURATOR for another. There’s thus nothing particularly linguistic about IAs; and, unlike Chomsky’s POSAs, they require no empirical premises about the informational environments in which languages are acquired. Also, since IAs imply that many concepts are innate that one would otherwise have thought pretty certainly aren’t (including DOORKNOB forsooth), the conclusions IAs lead to are substantive in a way that cries for help, grindings of teeth and the like are not. The philosophically interesting issue is not whether IAs are arguments of substance; it’s whether they aren’t plain crazy. ⁸
A final exegetical remark; according to Cowie, the conclusions of POSAs and the conclusion of IAs, though both incompatible with empiricism, are mutually independent. Perhaps it’s now clear why I think that’s wrong. What POSAs are supposed to show entails what IAs are supposed to show because there can’t be innate PAs unless there are innate concepts. ⁹ On the other hand, what IAs are supposed to show is independent of what POSAs are supposed to show since there could be innate concepts even if there were no innate PAs. ¹⁰
The upshot, then, is that there might be two kinds of reasons for thinking that there are innate concepts: roughly empirical ones, of the kind that POSAs allege, and roughly a priori ones of the kind that IAs do. As for the logical relations between POSAs and IAs on the one hand, and empiricism on the other, they go like this (according to me): The conclusions both of POSAs and of IAs are incompatible with empiricism if you read POSAs as entailing that there are innate PAs, IAs as entailing that there are innate concepts, and empiricism as denying that there is anything (much) that’s both innate and intentional. If, however, you read POSAs the way that Cowie does (viz. as arguing that learning is mediated by domain specific devices), what they preclude is not empiricism but associationism. So construed, POSAs are compatible with empiricism because empiricists can tolerate the domain specificity of learning so long as it isn’t itself innate (see Cowie’s own “Enlightened Empiricism,” to be discussed below.) But POSAs are incompatible with associationism because, if pretty much all of cognition is associative, then it’s pretty much all domain neutral: Association is supposed to act on concepts `mechanically,’ without respect to their contents. ¹¹Cowie misses all this because she both misconstrues POSAs, and runs empiricism and association together.
So much, then, for what I take to be wrong with Cowie’s account of what rationalists think that POSAs and IAs are supposed to show. We now start on the main stuff, which is her criticisms of these arguments.

2.2. The empirical arguments: POSAs.

In effect, Cowie has three points to make in Chapters 8-11 of her book:

2.2.1 The inference from empirical linguistic data to the innateness of UG requires as a premise that grammars are mentally represented; and the argument that grammars are mentally represented depends on such dubious ontological and methodological assumptions as that languages are mental objects and that linguistics is `part of psychology’

2.2.2 The empirical data that are supposed to demonstrate the paucity of information in the child’s linguistic corpus are, in fact, inconclusive.

2.2.3 There is no reason to prefer the thesis that UG is innate to the `enlightened empiricist’ thesis which says: `Yes, domain specific information is recruited in language learning; but, no, this domain specific information isn’t innate.’

I’ll consider Cowie’s arguments under these three heads.

2.2.1 What POSAs assume about languages and grammars:

Cowie endorses a criticism of Chomsky’s argument for nativism that I take it goes like this.

The thesis that UG is innate depends on the thesis that only grammars compatible with UG are `psychologically real’.
Grammars are psychologically real only if they are mentally represented.
So the empirical case for the innateness of UG depends on assuming that the kinds of evidence linguists offer for the grammars they write is evidence that the grammars are mentally represented.
Whether the kinds of evidence linguists offer for the grammars they write is evidence that the grammars are mentally represented depends on whether linguistics is “a part of psychology;” in particular, on whether the `truth makers’ for grammars are facts about the psychology of speaker/hearers.
The thesis that linguistics is part of psychology depends on arguments that are fraught with methodological and ontological premises, many of which a reasonable person might reasonably refuse to grant.
Chomsky should therefore conditionalize his conclusions about the innateness of UG not only upon the empirical evidence for grammars, but also upon the dubious methodological/ontological premises above mentioned.
So conditionalized, the argument for UG’s being innate is weak-to-nil even assuming that the empirical data linguists offer for the grammars they write are often convincing.

In short, according to this line of reasoning, deciding whether the available linguistic evidence argues for UG’s innateness requires first answering such questions as: `What sort of thing is a language?’, `What is the warrant of inferences from a creature’s behavioral capacities to its cognitive states?’, `What is the evidential status of the linguistic intuitions of native informants?’ `How, if at all, should the performance/competence distinction be drawn?’ and so forth. Given that many such matters remain (ahem!) unresolved, the empirical evidence that linguists offer for the predictive/explanatory successes of grammars that satisfy UG has no direct bearing on the issue between rationalists and empiricists. Chomsky’s inclination to suppose ---a priori, apparently--- that the psychological reality of a grammar and its truth are the same thing is at the bottom of this confusion. Likewise, all that’s required to dispel it is to recognize that “a grammar could be true of language… but false of speakers’ psychologies.” (244) In any case, ”it’s an empirical psychological question whether grammars provide true theories of linguistic competence. (246).”
But, surely, this diagnosis can’t be right? Surely linguists don’t have to do all that philosophy (or, worse yet, have to wait for us to do all that philosophy) before they get to do their science? Surely that would be unprecedented?
No doubt, somebody really should sort out the methodological and ontological (not to say the historical) issues involved in understanding the relations between psychological and linguistic theories. And, quite right, if an empirical assessment of nativism presupposes such a sorting out, then we are in no current position to make one. But, in fact, that is not to the point. For, even if the question whether UG is innate turns on (inter alia) the question whether grammars are mentally represented, the central argument that grammars are mentally represented does not (pace Cowie) invoke methodological premises about the relations between linguistics and psychology; or ontological premises about languages being mental objects. Rather, it turns on the predictive/explanatory success of grammars with respect to behaviors and behavioral capacities of speaker/hearers.
Here’s the argument from the explanatory/ predictive success of grammars to their being mentally represented:

It would explain the explanatory/predictive success of grammars if the information they express is available to speaker/hearers. No other explanation of the predictive/explanatory success of grammar is on offer. So, all else equal, we should suppose that the information that grammars express is available to speaker/hearers.
Cognitivism is common ground; a speaker/hearer’s behavior should be explained by reference to his propositional attitudes.
Taken together, (i) and (ii) license the (nondemonstrative) inference that the information grammars express is part of the what speaker/hearers know/believe/cognize. ¹²
Nobody has the slightest idea how a creature’s PAs could predict/explain its behavior unless the intentional objects of its PAs are mentally represented by the creature whose behavior they predict/explain.
So, all else equal, we should infer that well-evidenced grammars are mentally represented by speaker/hearers.

Please note the brevity of this argument; also its absolute and endearing freedom from any assumptions particular to the relation of linguistics to psychology, or to the ontology of languages or grammars. It could be run, just as well, on how the information that it’s polite not to dine with your hat on explains your taking your hat off at table. Likewise, it could be run by the most ardent Platonist, according to whom the truth makers for theories of languages are eternal facts about relations among nonnatural objects. Even Platonism is neutral on whether a speaker-hearer mentally represents the grammar of his language;it’s committed only on whether his doing so is what makes the grammar true. That’s just as well, since a Platonist might reasonably wish to explain the empirical success of a grammar in the same way that cognitivists do; viz. by assuming that the information it expresses is known to speaker/hearers of the corresponding language. ¹³And (have I mentioned this?) nobody has the slightest idea how what a creature knows could determine its behavior unless the propositional content of its knowledge is mentally represented.
Cowie’s way of proceeding belongs to a tradition of trying to settle issues about the `psychological reality’ of grammars, and/or of UG, by taking sides on issues about the ontology, methodology and epistemology of linguistics (see papers in Block, (1980); including my own). These issues are of considerable independent interest, to be sure. But the argument that UG/grammar is mentally represented simply does not address them. Indeed, though some of the assumptions of that argument are tendentious, not to say inflammatory, none of them are ones that Cowie disputes. Notably, she concedes all the following:

-the predictive/explanatory successes of grammars that conform to UG;
-a cognitivist construal of the `know’ in `S behaves so and so because he knows that such and such;’
-the `representational theory of mind, ’ according to which the causal consequences of a creature’s propositional attitudes are mediated by mental representations of their intentional content.

The inference from what Cowie concedes to the psychological reality of UG/grammar consists largely of `what else’ arguments: (What else but grammars being mentally represented could explain their empirical successes? What else but UG’s being innate could explain the child’s ability to assimilate the grammars whose predictive/explanatory success the story about grammars being mentally represented is supposed to account for?) Well, on what else if not `what else’ arguments would you expect to ground an empirical inference from data to theory? Empirical inferences are ipso facto not demonstrative
The possibility of justifying psychological reality claims by using arguments to the best explanation suggests reversing the order of demonstration that Cowie takes for granted: Instead of such claims depending on the prior vindication of the ontological and methodological `dubious assumptions,’ the vindication of the dubious assumptions should rest on the de facto empirical success of theories which require that grammars and UGs are psychologically real. That’s entirely as it should be. One vindicates the ontology and methodology of a science by appeal to the work they do, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
So the psychological reality of grammars explains their success; and the innateness of UG explains why successful grammars are structurally similar. I’m almost certain that Cowie’s book doesn’t contain a refutation of this line of thought; in fact, as far as I can tell, she says nothing at all about what might be wrong with it . Here is the passage in which she declines to do so: “[According to Chomsky,] since the hypothesis that the [language] learning mechanism respects the [UG] principle of structure dependence enables us to explain and predict many … linguistic phenomena… we should accept that it is our innate knowledge of [for example] UG’s principle of structure dependence that is at work in language-learning… I do not propose to criticize this inference to the best explanation… [since] it is hardly fair to expect the Chomskyan to show that his theory is better than rivals that do not yet exist. ¹⁴Accordingly, I will accept that Chomskyan nativism is the best available theory of language acquisition --- and argue that it provides no real explanation of language acquisition at all. (249)”
-The innateness of UG can’t provide the best explanation of language acquisition because it can provide “no real explanation” of language acquisition at all. Why is that? You might expect, at this point, that Cowie would revert to the thesis that UG couldn’t explain language acquisition sans an argument that grammars are mentally represented, and the arguments that grammars are mentally represented turn on methodological and ontological principles both suspect and obscure… etc, see above. But, disconcertingly, she doesn’t; the next long stretch of her polemic isn’t methodological or ontological, but straightforwardly psycholinguistic. It’s about the status of hypothesis-testing and parameter-setting models of first language learning; in particular, whether either could explain how the language learner uses the information in UG to induce a grammar from his corpus. This survey leads, finally, to the conclusion that “parameter setting models are too underdeveloped to be appealed to in support for such a claim… [and] the hypothesis testing model has been amply developed, but in the wrong sorts of ways. As a consequence, Chomsky’s identification of the principles of UG with the information specified [in the `initial state’ of the language learning device] remains unwarranted. (270)"
What on earth is going on? As far as I can make out, Cowie has two different arguments running in this part of her discussion. One turns on the methodological and ontological stuff about dubious assumptions. The other one is this: `UG doesn’t explain language acquisition unless there’s a theory about how the information it expresses is employed to get from a corpus to a grammar. But we haven’t got such a theory. Ergo…’ The present exegetical question is how these two arguments are supposed to fit together.
God only knows, and Cowie doesn’t say; but it does seem clear that the first doesn’t work and the second is unpersuasive if it’s offered as an alternative to the first. No doubt, something is badly wrong with Chomsky’s picture unless there is finally a story about how UG is used to project a grammar from a PLD (= from a corpus of Primary Linguistic Data). But a lot of hard empirical work has been done on this problem over the last several decades; and some pretty good stuff has turned up.¹⁵Surely, in any case, the plausibility of Chomsky’s story doesn’t require that one crack this nut first. What’s wrong with trying to crack one’s nuts in parallel? I would have thought that was the usual strategy of scientific research.
Why shouldn’t Chomsky say (what, in fact, he is forever saying): UGs are about what information the language acquisition process has access to. They thus invite (but don’t provide) a theory of how that information is exploited when a child infers a grammar from a PLD. It does follow that UG isn’t, all by itself, a “real explanation” of language acquisition. Cowie’s problem, however, is that nothing interesting follows from that; certainly not that postulating a mentally represented UG is other than essential for providing the `real explanation’ that’s required. The long and short is that Cowie needs a principled reason for doubting that the problem about how UGs function in language acquisition can be solved; but all she’s got is that, to date, nobody has solved it.
It often seems that Cowie is tempted by a kind of dialectic that goes like this: Somebody endorses a theory on the ground that it’s the best (available) explanation of some or other evidence. `T because it explains E,’ this guy says. `But,’ Cowie replies, `not T unless D; and maybe not D.’ ( So, for example, maybe UG explains why grammars have such a lot in common; but they can’t be what’s within unless there’s a story about how you get from UG and a PLD to a grammar; and we haven’t got such a story.) `So,’ Cowie seems tempted to conclude, `not `T because it explains E’ after all.’
But that way of arguing is no good. `T à D & maybe not D’ simply does not rebut, or even get a leg up on rebutting, `T because it explains E’. What you need, if you’re to do that, is some reason to believe `not D’ and `maybe not D’ doesn’t, of course, amount to one of those. To the contrary (and this is much of their charm), all else equal, a best explanation argument vindicates those of its own premises that are otherwise moot. If T à D, then if T is the best explanation of E, that is itself a `best explanation’ argument for D. It’s, no doubt, desperately sneaky of best explanation arguments thus to underwrite their own premises; they only get away it because they are so shamelessly nondemonstrative. Be that as it may, it makes them much harder to kill than Cowie seems to have an inkling of. Perhaps, on balance, it’s just as well that they’re so hardy since we’ve very little else to do our science with.
I think Cowie’s failure to understand how best explanation arguments work undermines quite a lot of her book. Still, her claim that there is, de facto, no good empirical evidence for UGs could be true; and, of course, you can’t run a `T because it explains E’ argument if you don’t have any E. So I turn now to Cowies’ second objection to POSAs, which is not that the bearing of their premises upon their conclusions is dubious (as per 2.2.1), but that the empirical data that the premises rely on are unpersuasive. In dispute here is primarily whether, as POSAs suppose, the child’s PLD is so empoverished that it radically underdetermines the grammar he acquires.

2.2.2. The status of the POSA data

POSA’s strategy is to claim that there is less information in the PLDs from which children acquire language ¹⁶ than would be needed if language acquisition were a species of learning. To be sure, such claims are often impressionistic; for who knows what a language learning process would demand of its input if it lacked specific, prior information about the kind of language it is to learn? Who knows, for that matter, anything about empiricist learning processes, unless they are associationistic (a thesis to which, as previously remarked, Cowie clearly does not wish to be committed.)
There are, however, some respects in which the issues can be focused. For example, Chomsky often argues that the corpora children have access to are unlikely to contain evidence that syntactic transformations are `structure dependent.’ (According to Chomsky, `Is the man who is wearing the hat bald?’ is the sort of sentence that shows that question-formation is sensitive to phrase structure rather than ordinal relations; for discussion see Chomsky (1972) ¹⁷.) Likewise, a lot of recent theorizing about the `learnability’ of various sorts of grammars proceeds from the assumption that the child has access to little or no `negative evidence’ about what expressions are not well-formed in his language. Much of Cowie’s long discussion of POSAs is about whether, in point of fact, the PLD really is empoverished in these respects. If it isn’t, then the putative "poverty of the stimulus… does nothing to brace the nativist position on language acquisition" (276).
On this reading of her text, Cowie has nothing against POSAs as a form of argument; she just doubts that, in the case of language acquisition, its empirical assumptions are true; even if parents don’t correct a child’s ungrammatical utterance overtly, their behavior may provide him with "subtle cues (228)" to its ill-formedness.¹⁸ And, Jeff Pullam once found, in a corpus drawn from the Wall Street Journal [sic!], "several" sentences that illustrate the structure sensitivity of question formation (including: "How fundamental are the changes these events portend?" and "Is what I’m doing in the shareholders’ best interest?") Pullam also found one in `The Importance of Being Ernest’ where Lady Bracknell wants to know "Who is that young person whose hand my nephew Algernon is now holding in what seems to me a peculiarly unnecessary manner?"
One might reasonably greet such observations with hilarity. It is, after all, Oscar’s little joke that only Bracknellish sorts of people talk in this Bracknellish sort of way. Indeed, in other moods, Cowie is herself very impressed by how much about a language a child might learn by attending to statistical properties of his corpus. "There is dramatic experimental evidence that the statistical properties of the inputs are used by children in order to abstract higher-level concepts for apparently `unobservable’ syntactic properties. (191) ¹⁹" Well, what would you guess is the relative frequency of Bracknell-sentences in speech that is addressed to (or overheard by) children? And if, as one might suspect, it must be vanishingly low, why don’t children who do happen to encounter such sentences prefer the hypothesis that they are ungrammatical to the hypothesis that the regularities in the PLD are structure sensitive?
Nevertheless, Cowie is absolutely right about the state of the data; it is, as she says "surely premature" to endorse a nativist account of language acquisition solely ---or even mostly--- on observations of what is or isn’t in the child’s corpus. Indeed, it always will be surely premature; in linguistics, as elsewhere in serious science, the confirmation of theories rests on an interplay between their explanatory/predictive successes and all sorts of other considerations about simplicity, economy, plausibility, the availability of alternatives, and so on familiarly. At most, one is entitled to wonder aloud why, if negative evidence and instances of the structure dependence of transformations really are essential to language acquisition, does the linguistic community make such data so hard for the child to find? Why make the poor creature search for it in `subtle cues’ or in the back pages of the WSJ? Is there some conspiracy among adults to keep the structure of their language hidden from their children? Perhaps the facts of grammar are like the facts of life: only to be revealed to those who have reached the age of discretion. Pas devant les enfants? ²⁰
Well, enough of that; I don’t propose to enter into a detailed review of the empirical literature on the typical contents of PLDs. Beyond doubt, every relevant observation is susceptible to rational challenge. It’s an understatement to claim that current assumptions "may be much too strong" and that our current picture of the PLD may be "badly skewed" (263). The trouble is: So what? At the risk of sounding merely pompous, I offer a methodological observation: Linguistics isn’t philosophy. (Neither, I suspect, is philosophy).
According to the standard metatheory, philosophical arguments are supposed to be knock-down; or better, lethal (for some good jokes about this, see Nozick, 1981). This means, in particular, that if you have a dozen arguments that P, all but one of which prove to be unsound, the one that remains should still be sufficient to make the case that P. In this respect, Philosophy is required to be like logic; perhaps, in their most secret fantasies, philosophers dream that it is logic. Probably that’s why so little philosophy works.
Linguistics, in any case, is different. Like any other empirical discipline, it appeals to a balance of plausibility. If, in particular, you consider the whole range of empirical data currently available, it seems pretty plausible that the PLD isn’t as rich as one might reasonably expect it to be if a rich corpus is essential for acquiring a grammar. My point is that attacking this claim the way Cowie does ---by attempting to undermine the experiments one by one--- is simply not appropriate to the polemical situation. What she needs, but clearly doesn’t have, is an argument that the available data suggests, even remotely, a PLD so rich that the child can is, as it were, squeeze through with lots of room to spare. (Notice how, as usual, it’s the counterfactuals that count; see fn. 15). There is, I venture to say, nothing in the psycholinguistic literature that suggests this; and, to my knowledge, empiricist arguments about language learning (Cowie’s definitely included) never so much as claim it; they claim just that the data aren’t apodictic. For the rest, one gets a priorisms: Empiricism should be preferred not because the PLD is independently seen to be saturated with information germane to acquiring a language, but rather on grounds of the simplicity, or generality, or neurological plausibility, or political correctness ²¹ of the learning theory that an empiricist approach would (/might,/might some day,/might in principle some day) allow us to construct.
If, in short, you wish seriously to evaluate the available data about the poverty of the child’s stimulus, the pertinent question is not `which of them can I perhaps impugn’; rather it’s whether, if they aren’t entirely misleading, a move in the direction of empiricism seems plausibly the way to account for them. Or put it like this: We know what facts about the PLD are alleged to argue for the face plausibility of the nativist picture; well, suppose all of those were to disappear. The question remains: What are the facts about the PLD that are supposed to argue for the face plausibility of the empiricist picture? Answer: As far as I know (and, certainly, as far as Cowie tells us) there are none.

2.2.3. Enlightened empiricism.

Suppose it turns out (as I’d expect it to on the balance of the evidence so far) that the PLD isn’t so rich as to make nativist speculations about the language acquisition mechanism patently otiose. Suppose, even, that it turns out that language acquisition requires a lot of domain specific information of the kind that would be expressed by a motivated formulation of UG. Still, it doesn’t follow that UG is innate. Maybe, rather, children start with principles that are innate but not domain specific (or, anyhow, not specific to the language domain). Couldn’t the integration of such information with the child’s’ nonlinguistic experience get him into a mind set that will, when he finally gets around to learning his language, require his hypotheses about the PLD to conform to UG? "It’s impossible to think that the learner was told that grammatical rules are structure-dependent. But it is certainly possible that she may have had other experiences that would lead her to seek deep rather than surface regularities.(182)." "Enlightened empiricism" (=EE) allows that language acquisition may crucially require prior knowledge of the domain specific sort that UG provides. That’s what makes EE "enlightened". But it insists that this prior knowledge is itself acquired rather than genotypically specified, and that the procedures by which it is acquired are (eventually) domain neutral. That’s what makes EE empiricism.
I will not dwell at great length on enlightened empiricism; for, though its plausibility is a main thesis of Cowie’s book, just think what is being proposed: Of the three or four years that it apparently takes a child to work out the grammatical structure of his language ²²,some unknown fraction is first devoted to constructing, on the basis of nonlinguistic experience (together with general principles of nondemonstrative inference (assuming there are such things)) a learned UG; viz a theory of what the sentence structures in all the possible natural languages that he doesn’t have to learn have in common with the sentence structures in the one that he does. What on earth would be the point (to say nothing of the feasibility) of instituting such an indirection? Has God joined the adult linguistic community in its plot to keep the grammar of their language hidden from their children? EE grants to the nativist that, whatever language a child may eventually learn to speak, he must be in prior possession of the very same UG as every other child. That being assumed, why doesn’t God just wire the damn thing in species-wide and let each child spend his time learning to talk the language of his speech community? It explains a lot to suppose that God is sort of stupid (see Hume’s `Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’); but could he possibly be that stupid? ²³
You will, in any case, not be surprised by now to hear that Cowie offers no account, and no examples, of how a domain neutral learning mechanism could be used to construct a language-specific learning mechanism which could then be relied on to deliver an adequate grammar of whatever language the child happens to encounter. Instead, when this problem starts to loom, Cowie is wont to speak of bootstraps.
`Bootstrapping,’ however, isn’t a theory of language acquisition (or, indeed, of anything acquisition). It’s just a name for whatever the process turns out to be that gets a child first from nonlinguistic experience to knowledge of the domains specific constraints UG imposes; and then from less good theories of the PLD that observe these constraints to better theories of the PLD that likewise observe these constraints; and, eventually, to the right theory of the PLD (which observes these constraints by assumption.) To say that the child solves the language acquisition problem by bootstrapping is to say that he solves it somehow; which is true, but not news. Since, to repeat, `bootstrapping’ is the name of this problem about acquisition, it is a fortiori, not the solution of this problem. It’s extremely depressing to find cognitive science back in a condition in which it is once again necessary to say such things.
Look, is it Cowie’s assumption that the regularities in the child’s nonlinguistic environment are structure dependent? If so, how does the child learn that they are? Since this seems to be another case of the same kind of question that we started with (viz. how does a child recognize that a regularity it encounters is structure dependent?) what has enlightened empiricism bought for us that the old, unilluminated kind did not?
The preceding paragraph gestures in the direction of what Cowie calls an `iteration’ argument: If it’s common ground that a child can’t learn a language unless he knows that P, and if, by assumption, knowledge that P is learned rather than innate, then it just follows that the child can’t learn the language unless he (somehow) learns that P. `Enlightened empiricism’ adds nothing to this truism except the assumption that the child learns P by (first) learning some (unspecified) Q that entails P ²⁴. There’s a dumb joke about an enlightened empiricist who could count sheep very fast. `How do you do it?’ everyone asked. `I count their legs and divide by four’ he replied.This, apparently, is the situation Cowie has in mind when she admits that enlightened empiricists haven’t a "detailed" alternative to nativism "on hand" "yet".²⁵
Considered as a positive theory of learning, the version of EE that Cowie describes is empty. But I wouldn’t want it to seem merely that Cowie has got hold of slightly the wrong kind of EE; so I’ll briefly consider an alternative formulation. I’d like to get it across that Cowie’s research program is, as one might say, robustly empty: tweaking the details doesn’t make it any fuller.
One might try holding some species of nonmodular rationalism, (in effect, what Cowie calls `weak rationalism’), according to which the child’s innate endowment includes a domain neutral constraint enjoining him (ceteris paribus) always to prefer theories that represent experiential regularities as structure dependent. That would be perfectly all right with empiricists as far as it goes; they take the principles of inductive inference to be innate, and maybe a bias towards hypothesizing structure dependence is one of these.
But notice that this compromise view won’t work unless the experiential regularities in nonlinguistic domains are typically structure dependent in the same way that linguistic regularities are; eg. they approximate to satisfying the formal linguistic universals. There is, however, not the slightest scintilla of evidence that any such thing is true. Indeed, supposing that the kind of structure dependence UG requires of linguistic rules will do for the general case would be a nonsense. The linguistic notion of structure applies only in domains for which a constituency relation is defined and independently motivated. Who knows which such domains there are? Surely some domains have ordinal structure of precisely the sort that (if Chomsky is right) sentences don’t; the months of the year starting with January, for example. That being so, to insist both that the child’s pre-wiring determines a domain-neutral preference for structure dependence of the kind that language exhibits, is to require the child to prefer false theories of such domains as happen not to be language-like. Only a very stupid God ---or a plain crazy one--- would endow the child with a learning rule that’s biased toward a kind of structure that, de facto, lots of domains don’t have
It is, I suppose, a truism that domains whose structures can be learned are ipso facto structured domains. But if you propose to make hay of this truism, you need to keep in mind that the domains there are, are structured in many different ways. If you don’t keep this in mind, it might occur to you that nonmodular rationalism is (not merely an alternative to Chomskian nativism but) a cognitive architecture for which transcendental justification can be supplied.²⁶ Cowie often writes as though she is moved by some such thought: A preference for structure dependence is A Good Thing As Such because `prefer dependent regularities’ and `prefer deep, explanatory regularity’ are two ways of saying the same thing. See, eg, p. 189: "a nonpositivist proponent of domain-neutral learning, taking Chomsky’s lesson to heart, would surely endow her learner with a bias towards seeking out the `hidden springs’ (and not the superficial regularities) in the world, a bias that in the domain of language would manifest itself as a preference for rules stated in terms of unobservables over those stated in terms of observables, that is for [the structurally dependent rule] H1 over [the structure independent rule] H¬¬¬2").
If, however, Cowie takes this impulse to transcendental argument seriously, she must be confused about what UG means when it says that linguistic rules are structure dependent. Linguistic rules are dependent on constituent structure; as opposed, say, to ordinal or cardinal structure; or the dimensional structure of visual space; or the Fourier structure of auditory stimulations; or the vector structure that Connectionists appear to think that everything depends on. Each of these kinds of structure seems quite `deep’ enough to be getting on with, so it’s hard to imagine a kind of argument that would choose among them a priori.
The kind of structure dependence UG cares about is just one among an infinity of ways that rules, operations, processes, and the like, might be sensitive to the organization of their domains. There is, as far as anybody knows, nothing that prefers any one such domain structure to any other in general. Nor is it easy to see why a process that is constituent structure dependent should be especially "unobservable;" or, indeed, why it should be endowed with any other epistemically interesting property. That there is nothing especially interesting about constituent structure is exactly why, if Chomsky is right about all grammars having rules that are constituent-structure sensitive, that’s a surprising discovery and it wants an explanation. Nativists have such an explanation, though, not one Cowie approves of; namely, that UG is innate. There isn’t, "yet" an empiricist alternative, transcendental or otherwise, to the best of my knowledge.

2.3 General learning mechanisms: Almost everybody thinks that some things must be learned; and almost nobody thinks that the basic mechanisms of belief formation could be among them. Well, if it’s common ground that some things are surely innate and it’s likewise common ground that other things surely aren’t, what (other than matters of degree) could there be left for nativists to argue with empiricists about? One might thus wonder why modern rationalists take so strong a line on acquisition mechanisms being domain specific. Even if, pace Cowie, the domain specificity of learning devices isn’t what they take to be the moral of POSA arguments, it’s clearly true that most nativists are pretty grumpy about domain neutrality. Why is that, do you suppose?
Fair question. I have, however, only a fable with which to answer it.
Fable: Once upon a time, there was this otherwise unremarkable guy (history did not record his name, so let us call him Anon; your local bookstore carries his stuff) who was really extraordinarily good at answering questions about opera. He could, for example, tell you every 19th century Italian composer of operas whose last name ended with `i’ (of which, I assure you, there were many.) He could likewise tell you who was the first violinist at the second performance of `Lohengrin’, and who was the second violinist at the first performance of `Lohengrin;’ and not just at Beyreuth, but also in Salt Lake City. And he could tell you who manufactured the swans. Also: Anon could quote the entire libretto of `Die Freishutz’ on request, and he knew where Callas sang on any evening in July of 1957, and how many elephants Verdi wanted there to be in chamber performances of `Aida.’ Mirabile dictu, Anon could explain the plot of `Simon Boccanegra’, a thing that nobody else has ever been able to do. He was, as I say, quite remarkably good at answering questions about opera, even by the standards of opera buffs.
So, of course, sensible people wondered a lot what could account for his prodigious facility. After some consideration, they converged upon the following hypothesis: `The reason,’ they said, `that Anon is so good at answering questions about opera must be that Anon knows a lot about opera. `That,’ they said, `would explain it.’ Having arrived at this not implausible view, they dispersed, each upon his own affairs.
Or rather, they were just about to when there spoke a philosopher of the empiricist persuasion. `It is not, after all, his knowing a lot about opera that explains Anon’s surprising ability to answer opera questions,’ said , the phthis philosopher. `Instead, it’s that Anon has in his head what I call a `General Purpose Question Answerer’ (of which I have discovered that the acronym is GPQA)’.
`Hmm,’ sensible people replied, `what exactly is a GPQA, and how does one work?’
`I will tell you,’ said the philosopher of Empiricist persuasion. `A GPQA is a black box that takes as its input any of an inordinately large range of questions and provides the corresponding answer as its output. Here is the flow diagram for such a device. It comes from the cutting edge of cognitive science.’

----------
Q à GPQA à A
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Figure 1: Flow diagram for a GPQA

`Pshaw!’ the sensible people replied; `for how could such a black box work?’
`It works by applying General Question Answering Principles,’ replied the philosopher of empiricist persuasion.
`And what are these General Question Answering Principles?’ the sensible people demanded
`As to that, inquiry is proceeding in my laboratory even as we speak.’
Sensible people thought about this for a while. Certain prima objections occurred to them. For example: ‘If, as you say, Anon has a GPQA in his head, what accounts for the domain specificity of his performance? Why is it that, although he is remarkably proficient at answering questions about operas, he is not nearly so good at answering questions about, as it might be, bagels; or about who won The World Series in 1905’?
`The available data to that effect are unapodictic’ said the philosopher of empiricist persuasion with hauteur. `Perhaps Anon is better at answering bagel questions and baseball questions than has thus far appeared. Perhaps, when closely examined, his behavior will exhibit subtle cues which show that he knows the answers after all. Or perhaps there is more information about opera in the environments where opera-questions are put to him than cursory investigations have suggested. Let us not, in any case, close our minds to such possibilities. For,’ said the philosopher of empiricist persuasion (who had perhaps begun to sound a bit like Auntie), "if I could urge just one thing as a `take home lesson’ to be drawn from this discussion… it would be this: …We need to look everywhere we can for relevant insights, data, and techniques (Cowie, 308)." `Further research will therefore be required; as will further funding.’
The philosopher of empiricist persuasion was about to enlarge upon the latter themes when sensible people, having, as they considered, heard enough, commenced to pelt him with small objects. This forced him to retire.
End fable.
Normal human children are, as far as we know, quite extraordinarily good at answering questions of the form: `What grammar underlies the language of which the following corpus is a sample (insert PLD here)?’ But this competence is, in a number of respects, strikingly narrow. For one thing, they exhibit no corresponding capacity for answering questions about bagels. For another, it appears that children can do their trick only if the PLD is drawn from a language the grammar of which conforms to UG. It thus seems plausible to many sensible people that part of the reason children are so good at answering questions about what grammar underlies a PLD is that they come to the task already knowing a lot about what kinds of grammars conform to UG; specifically, they know UG. And since there is no proposal on offer about how a child could possibly have learned UG before he learned his native language, many sensible people think that UG must be innate. And even sensible people who don’t think that it’s exactly UG that’s innate are inclined to think something must be that is at least equally dedicated and equally complicated. A fortiori, they think that what’s within isn’t a General Purpose Learning Machine.
Wherein does the symmetry fail? If postulating a General Purpose Question Answerer is not a reasonable alternative to the theory that Anon knows (innately or otherwise) a lot about opera, why is postulating a General Purpose Learning Mechanism a reasonable alternative to the theory that children know (innately) a lot about UG? One wanders through the empiricist landscape, holding one’s little lantern aloft, asking this question of the locals one encounters. And never getting a sensible answer. That’s what makes nativists so grumpy.

2.2.4 Essentialism: I remarked, at the beginning of the discussion of POSAs, that quite a lot of Cowie’s polemic amounts to reiteration of points that are familiar from the linguistic and psycholinguistic literature. She does, however, offer one line of pro-Empiricist argument that is, as far as I know, quite without precedent: "[According to Chomsky] Linguistic Theory characterizes the essential properties of languages; it delimits the set of possible natural languages. But it is in general false that we need to know about the essential properties of a thing in order to learn about it. … a child’s grip on cathood predates her excursions into zoology…. Reflection on the nature of learning tout court, I’m suggesting, should have alerted us .. to the possibility that Chomskyan theories of language learning are on the wrong track. (273)"
I do think that is confused. For one thing, acquiring the concept CAT does, of course, require learning what property is proprietary to cats as such; namely, being cats. Likewise, in the untechnical sense in which a monolingual Russian speaker can perfectly well have the concept ENGLISH SENTENCE, his having it doesn’t (according to Chomsky or anyone else) require his cognizing the grammar of English. It requires only that he understand that whatever ENGLISH SENTENCE applies to is, ipso facto, an English sentence. Or (a formulation I prefer on balance) it requires only that he be able to think about English sentences as such.
By contrast, Chomsky puts in play a quite technical notion of concept possession according to which mastering ENGLISH SENTENCE requires becoming a speaker/hearer of English (and hence, by assumption, cognizing English grammar.) Whether Chomsky’s technical sense of concept possession actually applies to anything is, of course, a Very Deep Empirical Issue. If it doesn’t, then he and I have both wasted quite a lot of our time over the years. In any case, according to Chomsky’s usage, the typical consequence of having the concept SENTENCE OF L is being able to recognize and construct arbitrary sentences that belong to L. Since, to repeat, nothing of the sort is true of concept possession in the vernacular, learning CAT does not (Pace Cowie) provide a model for learning ENGLISH SENTENCE. ²⁷
Once that is straightened out, it’s really quite plausible that when having a concept of X requires being able to make and recognize Xs, coming to have the concept of X will require mastering a metaphysical theory about Xs. That’s why, though people have had the concept WATER for simply ages, it was only when we learned what the property of being water is (only, as one says, when we got the `technical’ concept WATER) that we were able to make some in the laboratory, and to distinguish arbitrarily close approximations to water from the real thing. Likewise, though we’ve had cats and their concept ever since we lived in Egypt, it’s only quite recently that we’ve begun seriously to contemplate building a cat from scratch.
So much for Part 2. Let’s turn to the impossibility arguments.

top | PART 3

Doing Without What’s Within; Fiona Cowie’s Critique of Nativism

by Jerry Fodor

Rutgers University

PART 3: The Impossibility Arguments.

I’m afraid I am now required to set out some background. I must trace the course of an argument I’ve been having (mostly with myself) for the last twenty five years or so, as to whether, given plausible empirical premises, it is even coherent to hold that there is such a process as concept learning. And, if it’s not, what nativistic alternatives there might be.
I managed some time back to convince myself that Impossibility Arguments show that the received account of concept learning is indeed incoherent. But it has recently occurred to me that the implications of this can perhaps be made to sound a little less preposterous than, for example, that the concept CARBURATOR (or the concept CURRY) is innate. Contrary to what I had at first supposed, there is a way of saying things like `no concepts are learned; a fortiori, the concept CARBURATOR isn’t learned’ that makes it not also require saying things like `no concepts are learned; a fortiori the concept CARBURATOR is innate.’
That strikes me as, if perhaps not awfully important in the long run, still a good thing tactically. For some reason, philosophers, who are often prepared to swallow the most outlandish views ----that there aren’t any tables or chairs; or that there aren’t any numbers; or that there aren’t any minds; or that, (to the contrary) there is nothing but minds; or that there is nothing but numbers; (I haven’t heard of a philosopher according to whom there is nothing but tables and chairs, but my knowledge of the ontological literature is fragmentary); or that we made the stars; or that there is no distinction between confirmation and truth; or that the only good is the greatest happiness of the greatest number; or that the goal of physics is to predict the state of excitation of one’s sensory neurons… and so forth, practically endlessly--- philosophers, who have learned to gaze on all of that and not to boggle, tend to become quite hysterical at the thought that the human conceptual repertoire, CARBURATOR included, might be innately specified. Their view, apparently, is that human ethology (unlike, say, spider ethology, or fish ethology) is an a priori science, primarily responsible to what strikes philosophers as plausible from a genetic or an evolutionary point of view.
That being so, and what with the notion of concept learning being incoherent (according to an argument I find convincing) it would be nice if one could somehow endorse the Impossibility Argument without having to say that CARBURATOR is innate
Cowie, of course, thinks that IAs are unsound, hence that we needn’t worry about what form of concept nativism the philosophical community might be prepared to tolerate. Partly she thinks this on methodological grounds, but mostly on the ground that a key premise of IA isn’t true. As it turns out, I’m comprehensively unmoved by the considerations she raises; I’ll tell you why in just a moment. First I’ll have to give you a sketch of how IA is supposed to run. Then I’ll tell you what kind of concept nativism I think we ought to endorse if IA is sound; and why I think that kind of concept nativism is independently plausible. Then I’ll tell you why Cowie rejects (not just the Impossibility Argument but, also and independently,) the kind of concept nativism I’m proposing. Then I will tell you why her grounds for rejecting it are insubstantial. Then, I think, we can call it a day.
IA runs on the following assumptions, from which, it claims, the incoherence of the received view of concept learning follows:
3.1. Environmentally caused alterations of a creature’s conceptual repertoire count as concept learning only if they are mediated by processes of hypothesis formation and confirmation; if one were somehow to acquire the concept DOORKNOB by surgical insertion, that would not count as learning it. I take it that this is actually not in dispute. Surgical insertion is not a species of hypothesis formation; and to my knowledge, no alternative to the hypothesis testing account of concept learning has ever been proposed. (There are, to be sure, many different vocabularies that this hypothesis has been couched in, and people who espouse it thus often fail to notice that they’ve done so.)
It thus bears emphasis that, if you accept 3.1, you already have good reason to doubt that the notion of concept learning is coherent. What hypothesis confirmation eventuates in confirming is, after all hypotheses; and concepts are not hypotheses (a muddled Pragmatist tradition to the contrary notwithstanding). You can, for example, (dis)confirm the hypothesis that dogs bark; but you can’t (dis)confirm the concept DOG or the concept BARK. That concepts aren’t hypotheses should hardly seem surprising since concepts are the constituents of hypotheses; concepts are what hypotheses are made of and are thus prior to hypotheses, in much the ways that bricks are prior to brick houses. Since concepts are prior to hypotheses, they are a fortiori, concepts are prior to the (dis)confirmation of hypotheses. Empiricists have been confused about these priority relations between (what used to be called) `Ideas’ and `Judgements’ for several centuries, and the end of this also is not in sight. Just as Kant and Frege both warned it would, confusing Ideas with Judgements got empiricists into endless trouble, including their egregious failure to understand that theories of concept acquisition must differ in kind from theories of belief fixation; in particular, that the former can’t be learning theories as 3.1 understand that notion.²⁸
3.2. `Most’ of our concepts are primitives; i.e. they have no internal structure; i.e. they haven’t got other concepts as constituents (in the way that, for example, it’s often supposed that the concept DOG has the concept ANIMAL as one of its constituents, and that the concept BACHELOR has the concept UNMARRIED as one of its constituents.)
Whereas 3.1 is more or less untendentious (presumably because its unsettling implications have not been widely recognized), 3.2 very clearly isn’t. I take it, however, that 3.2 is licensed by the following subsidiary argument:
3.2.1 Not all concepts could have other concepts as parts (at least some concepts must be `primitive’). This I take to be common ground.
3.2.2 Broadly empirical considerations (from cognitive psychology and elsewhere) show that `most’ concepts could have internal structure only if most concepts are (something like) stereotypes or prototypes. (For discussion of some of this literature, see Fodor (1998a))
3.2.3 There are decisive reasons why `most’ concepts can’t be (anything like) stereotypes or prototypes.
Cowie has two main lines of attack on the soundness of the Impossibility Argument, one of which centers on 3.2.3; we’ll turn to that presently.
3.2.4 Primitive (unstructured) concepts can’t be learned by the formation/ confirmation of hypothesis. ²⁹
The basic argument for 3.2.4. is that its denial leads to circularity. Consider a concept like RED (which is pretty widely agreed to be primitive if any concept is.) How would a hypothesis testing account imagine that RED is learned? Well, presumably learning RED would involve confirming some hypothesis about which concept RED is (about its `individuating properties’); as, for example, that it’s the concept that expresses the property of being red. But, clearly, that can’t be right; for any hypothesis of the form X is the concept that expresses the property of being red ipso facto contains the concept RED among its constituents. A fortiori, it’s not a hypothesis that could be formulated by someone who lacked that concept. A fortiori it’s not a hypothesis that could be (dis)confirmed by anyone who lacked that concept. Since the same reasoning goes through, mutatis mutandis, for any concept that is supposed to be primitive, it follows that primitive concepts can’t be learned (where learning means what 3.1 says that it does). Hume got this right: "…whenever we reason, we must antecedently [my emphasis] be possest of clear ideas, which may be the objects of our reasoning. The conception always precedes the understanding… (214)." You can’t reason with a concept you don’t already have.³⁰ So `most’ primitive concepts can’t be acquired by reasoning. But, taken together, 3.2.2 and 3.2.3 imply that `most’ of our concepts are primitive. So `most’ of our concepts are unlearned.
Just a word about the shudder quotes around `most’. Clearly we have infinitely many structured concepts (ones that have other concepts as constituents) Thus my concept A FRIEND OF MY AUNT contains, among its parts the concepts FRIEND and AUNT, as do infinitely many concepts that belong to the same family: A FRIEND OF A FRIEND OF MY AUNT… and so on. This is, once again common ground. But what of the concepts FRIEND and AUNT themselves? Are they primitive, or do they have parts? And if the latter, what parts do they have? It’s clear, in any case, that if AUNT has constituents, the corresponding English expression (viz. `Aunt’) doesn’t display them; (unlike, of course, the English expression that corresponds to A FRIEND OF MY AUNT, (viz ` a friend of my Aunt’) which, as it were, shows that FRIEND and AUNT are parts of the complex concept that it expresses.) All that being so, we can now take the quotes off `most’. The conclusion of the Impossibility Argument is supposed to be that the set of unlearned concepts is approximately coextensive with the set of concepts whose structures are not displayed by the corresponding English expressions. (It therefore likely includes FRIEND and AUNT, but not FRIEND OF MY AUNT.) This is all very approximate, to be sure, but it will do for the purposes of hand since I suppose that, if anything of even approximately this sort is true, then empiricism isn’t.
So now, at last:

3.3 Cowie’s objections to the impossibility argument.

In an earlier draft of this paper, I allowed myself a little grumble about Cowie’s tendency to offer, against some proposition she has under attack, a fardel of arguments the conjunction of whose premises is not consistent and some of which must therefore be unsound.³¹ It’s hard on the weary exegete that Cowie generally doesn’t say which arguments she proposes to give up in case she can’t have them all. In the event, however, I decided to delete that passage. (I think it is good for my character occasionally to resist the temptation to grumble. Very occasionally.) But the reader should be advised that we’ve now come to a polemical situation of this kind.
Cowie has two objections to impossibility arguments. One is that (pace 3.2.2) most concepts are prototypes, and it’s common ground that prototypes are complex statistical structures and can be learned by assembling them from their constituents. The second argument, however, takes a much stronger line in that it seems to reject, a priori, the very idea that a concept might be innate. Now, I really don’t think Cowie can have this both ways. Prototypes are ipso facto constructions out of a primitive conceptual basis; and, as far as I can tell, Cowie accepts that primitive concepts have to be unlearned (as per 3.2.4). But if that is so, she can hardly claim to be possessed of a general and principled argument that no concepts are innate.
In short: Cowie’s empiricist account of how concepts are acquired applies only to concepts that have (or are) prototypes. But if prototypes are ipso facto learnable, that’s because they are ipso facto structurally complex, hence not primitive concepts. So, it looks to me that, qua friend of prototypes, Cowie needs there to be a bona fide set of innate primitives. So, conceive of my puzzlement upon encountering such passages as this: "Fodor talks of [innate, primitive] concepts `becoming available,’ as if acquisition were the activation by a triggering stimulus of some sort of preexisting conceptlike object. We come into the world equipped with a stock of `protoconcepts,’ mental structures of some sort that become fully fledged concepts once they are triggered by an appropriate stimulus… I’ll argue that this… picture is seriously confused. For there’s simply nothing for protoconcepts to be [sic] (83). " Well, I am confused; I don’t see how it could both be that learned concepts are ipso facto complex and nonetheless that no concepts are innate. That’s why not just paradigm rationalists, but also paradigm empiricists (Locke, Hume, William James) have always agreed that primitive concepts must be innate (for some references see Fodor, (1981)). How could a creature that has no concepts learn anything? (Say "bootstrap" and I’ll scream.)
So, I don’t think that both Cowie’s objections to the impossibility argument could be sound; the positive (prototype based) view of concept acquisition towards which she gestures seems to me not to cohere with her claim that proto-(viz. innate) concepts are ipso facto corrupt. I won’t, however speculate on how she might seek to reconcile these two sorts of argument. Since both of Cowie’s objections to IAs are unsound, it doesn’t matter, for our purpose, that their premises aren’t compatible.

3.3.1. Cowie’s argument against protoconcepts.

(This is a short argument.) Innate concepts (like concepts that aren’t innate; for that matter, like anything at all) are in want of principles of individuation. Now, patently, concepts are individuated by their contents inter alia; viz `semantically’. ³² Let’s assume some or other sort of `externalist’ metaphysics of content (eg. that the content of a concept supervenes on world-to-mind causal interactions.) Well, unactivated innate concepts ---those that are, as it were, waiting around to be triggered--- are presumably ipso facto not causally connected to anything in the world. So, according to externalism, they can’t have any contents; so they can’t be content-individuated; so they can’t be concepts. "There is simply nothing for protoconcepts to be" compatible with, on the one hand, concepts being necessarily semantically individuated and, on the other hand, protoconcepts being de facto causally inert. ³³
So, the question comes down to: Could an externalist believe that there are innate ideas? Pace Cowie, the answer is: `Sure.’ For example, an externalist could hold that the semantic properties of `protoconcepts’ supervene on their dispositions to enter into causal world-to-mind relations. Maybe what makes a mental representation a token of the protoconcept type CAT is its disposition to be triggered by cats. ³⁴
It is, I think, very puzzling that Cowie doesn’t seriously consider the possibility of an externalist nativism that is dispositionalist about the semantic properties of concepts (all the more so since she does, briefly, consider the possibility of a dispositionalist internalism; see the footnote before last.) Unless there are passages I’ve overlooked, the closest she gets is her remark (on p. 91) that "on one … model … experience serves to trigger innate protoconcepts, transforming preexisting mental objects … into fully fledged intentional objects. [However]… the assertion that protoconcepts are triggered by experience boils down to the observation, with which no one would disagree, that there’s something about our minds such that our experiences lead to our getting concepts." But no argument is provided that the former thesis does indeed `boil down’ to the latter; and a moment’s reflection suggests that it couldn’t possibly. On all standard ethological accounts of triggering, part of what’s innate in a triggered concept is a specification of its proprietary trigger. Since the trigger of an innate concept is both proprietary and innately specified, such concepts can be unvacuously individuated by reference to what would trigger them; which is to say, by reference to their characteristic dispositions to enter into world-to-mind relations. ³⁵
Cowie thinks that postulating innate concepts should be avoided because it raises a pseudo-question to which no answer can be forthcoming: What constitutes the content of a concept when the concept is causally inert (eg. before it is triggered)? I’ve just argued, to the contrary, that the content of protoconcepts is no particular problem for a semantic externalist, so long as he assumes that it supervenes on (possibly unactualized) dispositions. But there is also a less narrow point to make; one that I think is sufficiently interesting as to merit (sigh, another) digression. The question about content that Cowie thinks that the postulation of innate concepts raises is of a kind that has familiar avatars outside nativist psychology. And it’s one which, in consequence of the so-called `informational revolution’ in biology, we now have some idea how to answer.
Put innate ideas to one side, and consider the structural similarity between two problems, the solution of each of which was crucial in determining the course of a science that raised it:

Mendel’s problem: What becomes of the properties of organisms when they aren’t phenotypically expressed?

(J.B.) Watson’s problem: What becomes of the intentional contents of propositional attitudes when they aren’t the objects of thought?

In both cases, there is the same crucial constraint on the answer. Unexpressed phenotypic properties needn’t just `go away’; they can skip generations and cause the offspring of heterozygotes to be more similar to their grandparents than they are to their parents. Likewise, the behavioral (etc.) expressions of one’s propositional attitudes are typically discontinuous; often, you can remember your name even across an interval of dreamless sleep. By contrast, however, causal chains can’t skip links; they require that something going on all the time between the first component cause and the last component effect. So, what’s to do? How can it be that mental contents that aren’t being thought, and phenotypic traits that aren’t being instantiated, are nonetheless among the links in causal chains? These questions must have answers, whatever you may think about innate ideas and such.
As indeed they do. Unexpressed traits (unattended contents) can be coded for by microstructures that persist even through time stretches when the traits (/contents) don’t manifest themselves. So, one’s `genes for’ blue eyes can persist in one’s brown-eyed children, who may then themselves have children with `blue eyes just like Granny’s’. So too, the neural `engram’ that encodes your knowledge of your name may continue to do so even while you’re asleep. Prima facie, these sorts of explanation of (what would otherwise appear to be) temporal gaps in causal histories are extremely persuasive. Watson himself went half bananas trying (and failing) to reconcile them with his behaviorism. (At one point, he was tempted by the thought that a sleeper who remembers that P is perhaps saying `P’ to himself, sotto voce, all through the night.) Mendel, being less methodologically inhibited, invented the gene.

3.4 Cowies argument for prototypes.

It’s common ground that some such premise as 3.2.1 appears essentially in Impossibility Arguments ³⁶ For, suppose that most concepts are prototypes after all. Then most concepts are complex, and could be learned by confirming hypotheses that identify the prototype. If the concept FISH is the prototype `wet, lives in the ocean and has scales’ then learning that fish are (typically) wet, scaly and ocean dwelling is all there need be to learning FISH. So sans an argument that most concepts aren’t prototypes, IA fails.
But there is such an argument, and it’s short. Let C1 be a complex concept, of which the constituents are C2 … Cn (each of the latter may be either primitive or complex.) Then: nothing belongs to the content of C1 except what belongs to the content of C2 or C3 or…Cn ³⁷. Call this the Compositionality Constraint (=CC.) It says, in effect, that that the identity of a complex concept is entirely determined by the identity of its constituents. Since Cowie doesn’t deny the compositionality of concepts, I won’t bother to argue for CC except to remark that, as far as anybody knows, explaining the productivity and systematicity of conceptual repertoires depends on it. That makes CC not negotiable.
We arrive at Cowie’s second objection to the Impossibility Argument.
I hold that concepts can’t be prototypes, hence that `most’ concepts must be unstructured, hence that most concepts must be unlearned. My argument for the crucial first step is that prototypes don’t satisfy CC. Patently (to cite some of the classic examples) the prototypical pet fish is neither a prototypical pet nor a prototypical fish; the prototypical male nurse may be a prototypical male but is not a prototypical nurse. And so on through productively many cases. (For much more discussion, and for the argument that if concepts are prototypes, the set of counterexamples to CC is productive, see Fodor 1998a, Ch. 4.)
To this line of thought, Cowie offers the following reply. Perhaps the possession conditions for `most’ primitive concepts have two parts: they require both a prototype and something that determines the concept’s extension ³⁸. Since the prototypes of a concept is, ipso facto, the intentional object of some of that concept’s owner’s propositional attitudes, learning its prototype can be a possession condition for having even a primitive concept. However, by assumption, prototypes do not satisfy CC; accordingly complex concepts need not have prototypes (and if a complex concept does, its prototype needn’t be inherited from its constituents.) The situation is otherwise for the extension-determiners. Externalism being assumed, the extension of a concept is determined by causal (world-to- mind) relations; so concept possession requires the appropriate such relations to be in place. But nobody need know what they are, or even that they are, in order to have the concept in question. This is Cowie’s version of the familiar externalist maxim that meanings `ain’t in the head.’ (The general picture derives, of course, from Putnam (1975).) Cowie expresses her two-factor account of the individuation of primitive concepts by saying that there are two senses of `meaning’ (circa p. 145): meanings "in the technical sense" are required to compose. Meanings "in the intuitive sense" are what prototype theory gives an account of, and CC doesn’t apply to them.
So everything’s fine; for `most’ concepts, including most primitive concepts, the possession conditions can after all include some learning that P. IAs to the contrary not withstanding.
This is a way out of impossibility arguments that a lot of people have suggested (including Stephen Schiffer, Christopher Peacocke, Jessie Prinz, Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence among others). The key idea is that, although nothing belongs to the individuation of a complex concept except what it inherits from its constituents (per CC), it doesn’t follow that nothing belongs to the individuation of a constituent concept except what it contribute to its hosts. This means that there can be possession conditions for a constituent concept that are not ipso facto among the possession conditions of its hosts., and knowing the prototype for the concept might be one of these, So it could turn out that, although you can’t have DOG unless you know the DOG prototype, nevertheless, you can have the DOG FROM NEBRASKA even though there is no prototype that corresponds to it; all that’s required, for the latter, is that the corresponding mental representation have the right semantic value.
But this two factor story won’t do. For extended discussion, see Fodor 1998b, Chs. 3.4; but here’s the gist: If the possession conditions on a constituent concept C are not inherited by its host H, then it should be perfectly possible to have the latter without having the former. So (eg.) it should be perfectly possible to have the concept DOG FROM NEBRASKA without having either the concept DOG or the concept NEBRASKA ³⁹.(A fortiori, it should be possible that someone is able to think DOG FROM NEBRASKA but not able to think either DOG or NEBRASKA and so does not find `compelling’ either the inference that dogs from Nebraska are dogs, or that they are from Nebraska, or that if something is a dog and from Nebraska, then it’s a dog from Nebraska.) I take that to be about as decisive as reductios get in this part of the woods.
The upshot is that CC needs to hold in a biconditional form: P is a possession condition on a constituent concept iff it is a possession condition on that concept’s hosts; nothing belongs to the content of a primitive concept except what it transmits to its hosts. If this is right it is very important quite aside from the innateness issues. Practically all the standard theories of conceptual content (mutatis mutandis lexical meaning, assuming that the meaning of a word is the concept it expresses) fail this strong version of CC. In particular, all theories fail according to which epistemic capacities are among the conditions on concept possession. Probably that leaves only theories that identify conceptual contents (/lexical meanings) with semantic values. These are, however, Very Deep Matters, best discussed elsewhere. (See, once again, Fodor 1998b (Chs. 4 and 5). I do wish you would read those papers. Perhaps if I were to offer a small reward? )
Where does this leave us? Well, if CC holds in its strong form, then the Impossibility Argument is presumably ok; anyhow, it’s ok for all that Cowie has to say against it. If the Impossibility Argument is ok, then `most’ such concepts as CAT. DOORKNOB and CARBURATOR aren’t acquired by a learning process, which is what I’ve been trying to tell you all along.
But now there’s really is a quandary since, if most concepts aren’t learned by hypothesis formation and confirmation, why is it that so many concepts are acquired from experiences of things that fall under them? Why is it, for example, that DOORKNOB is typically acquired from experiences of doorknobs (and not, say, from experiences with cats, carburetors or pet fish?) If , as IA appears to require, the processes underlying concept acquisition are more like triggering than they are like induction, almost anything might turn out to be the trigger for DOORKNOB.
That is what Concepts called the `doorknob/DOORKNOB’ (=d/D) problem. The main theme of Concepts is that you have a d/D problem as soon as you accept the Impossibility Argument: for, whereas IA says that concept acquisition can’t be a kind of induction, the fact that concepts are typically learned from their instance suggests that it has to be. The Impossibility Argument wants concept nativism, and the d/D problem wants concept empiricism. You can’t have both so something’s gotta give.
Concepts offered a way of splitting this difference; one I rather like (though. of course, Cowie doesn’t.) A word on this and then we really are finished. Promise.

3.5 The `Constitution’ Thesis.

Concepts suggests an alternative to inductivist solutions of the d/D problem. True, we generally acquire DOORKNOB from doorknobs (indeed, from good (roughly, paradigm) instances of doorknobs). So be it. But maybe that’s not after all because concept acquisition is hypothesis confirmation; maybe it’s because of what property being a doorknob is. The idea is that being a doorknob is mind-dependent. To be a doorknob is to have that property that minds like ours `lock’ to ⁴⁰in consequence of the kinds of experiences from which our kinds of mind learn the doorknob prototype. In effect, the proposal is to do for (or to) being a doorknob what Locke did for being red (and what Hume’s `second definition’ proposes to do for being a cause (Treatise, Bk. 1 Sect. XIV)); namely make it a property that’s defined relative to us. If one takes this line, then `how come DOORKNOB is generally learned from doorknobs?’ is to be answered in the same way that Locke dealt with `How come it’s typically red-sensations that red things cause us to have?’ The answer, in both cases, is `that’s of the essence of the properties concerned’.
As I say, this strikes me as rather a good idea; I intend, in fact, to spend a couple of more years having it. If it works, then empiricists and rationalists are both partly right about where concepts come from. The acquisition of DOORKNOB, for example, has two phases: One of them maps from (eg.) doorknob experiences to (something like) a doorknob prototype. Since prototype formation is generally held to be a species of statistical inference, this phase of concept acquisition approximates to being a rational process, just as empiricists would like. But, as we’ve seen, prototypes don’t compose, so they aren’t the right kind of mental representations to be concepts; or even to be components of concepts, given that CC holds in the strong form. So there has to be another stage of DOORKNOB acquisition; one that starts from a doorknob prototype ⁴¹and yields a mental representation that is of the right kind to be the concept DOORKNOB; namely a mental representation that is `locked’ (see above) to an extension that includes all and only the doorknobs. I suppose it’s just a brute fact about minds like ours that experiences of the sort that eventuate in doorknob-prototype-formation also eventuate in locking to doorknobhood; if we had different kinds of minds, we’d (as one used to say) `generalize’ differently from our experiences of prototypical doorknobs.⁴²Likewise, if we had different kinds of eyes, we wouldn’t generalize from experiences of tomatoes to a mental representation that’s locked to being red. So said Locke, and so say I.
Well, of course there are lots of problems with this picture; and of course the odds are that nothing of the kind will work; those are overwhelmingly the odds on any theory of mind that’s been thought of so far. But I’m unmoved by what Cowie has against it. So deeply unmoved, in fact, that I’ll take only a moment in going through her objections.
The first is that Cowie doesn’t like Lockean essences; she doesn’t like properties being individuated in terms of the effects things that things that instance them have on us. She says she suspects that this kind of metaphysics must always turn out circular. (Cf. the traditional worry about Locke’s story about being red: that it presupposes the notion of a red-sensation). But, as Cowie herself remarks, the discussion of this point has now had a couple of hundred years of being inconclusive. Perhaps it will eventually come out my (and Locke’s) way after all. Since Cowie admits to having no argument to the contrary that amounts to more than voicing a suspicion, how about if we all agree to give me the benefit of this doubt?
Cowie’s second objection begs the main issue. She says that my story about the constitution of doorknobhood and the like doesn’t really give us what we want. What Cowie says we want is a psychology of concept acquisition; in particular, a theory of the mechanism whose operation explains it. Whereas, Cowie complains, I haven’t provided anything like such a theory; only a (dubious) metaphysics for being a doorknob. It is a "serious mistake" to confuse a piece of metaphysics (dubious or otherwise) with a theory of cognition. To offer the one where the other is wanted would be a typical example of philosophical a priorism.
Indeed it would; but in fact I don’t. The `constitution’ story isn’t supposed to be a theory of concept acquisition; it’s supposed to be an answer to the d/D problem. The whole point of the strategy in Concepts to argue that d/D for distinguishing the d/D problem from the concept acquisition problem. According to Concepts, d/D is a metaphysical problem that’s been misidentified as psychological. What really is psychological (according to me) is not d/D but concept acquisition. Nobody knows how concept acquisition works, and I’m not expecting that anybody will find out in the next couple of weeks. But at lest we can avoid a paradox that had seemed to threaten: on the one hand, d/D gives us good reason to believe that something inductive (like prototype formation) is part of concept acquisition; and, on the other hand, the Impossibility Argument shows that concept acquisition can’t be inductive. This looks like a dilemma, hence a serious embarrassment for anybody who runs a concept-based theory of mind, whichever side of the rationalist/empiricist dispute he favors. It seems, in fact, to show that there’s something wrong with RTM per se.
But, thank goodness, the constitution story shows that it doesn’t. So, like the man in Kierkegaard, we’re alright so for.⁴³
Now, really: Did that sound to you like a moan? Or a cry for help? According to Cowie, "Fodor’s position is of a kind with the mystery-mongering of Descartes and Leibniz… Fodor makes it admirably explicit that his `bottom line’ … is that acquiring concepts is a psychologically inexplicable process… none of the psychologist’s business. (106-107)."
Actually, if I can have Leibniz and/or Descartes for company, I’m quite prepared to monger mysteries till the cows come home. Still, the present objection is another case of Cowie’s failing to grasp the polemical position. If concept formation includes a brute causal process (like the triggering of a concept by a prototype) then to that extent it is none of the (intentional) psychologist’s business. But it doesn’t follow that it’s a mystery, or that it’s `inexplicable’ tout court. (While we’re at it, it also doesn’t follow that it isn’t.) What follows is just that concept acquisition is not a phenomenon in the domain of (intentional) psychology. Contrary, to be sure, to what intentional psychologists have generally supposed.⁴⁴ Maybe concept acquisition is a phenomenon in the domain of neurology; or physiology; or, for all I know (and for all Cowie does), geology. Any of those would surely be compatible with `the scientific world view’. Most, indeed overwhelmingly most, things that happen in the world aren’t phenomena in the domain of intentional psychology. What’s so interesting about the mind, as cognitive science has come to understand it, is that it appears to be atypical; some of the things that happen in it apparently are. The research issue (not to be answered a priori) is which ones?
`All right, all right; so maybe your constitution story isn’t a cry for help. But isn’t it still Radically Nativist? Are you a rationalist or aren’t you? Damn it, why don’t you `fess up?’ "Regardless of what Fodor wants to call himself, the question still arises: Is he a nativist….(Cowie, p. 106)" Actually, what I’m trying for is something in the middle: Empiricism is right about the relation between one’s experiences and the prototypes that having them lead one to construct. Nativism is right about the relation between the prototypes that one’s experiences lead one to construct and the concepts that constructing the prototypes trigger. Does that make Fodor Still A Radical Nativist After All? If, you positively insist that I come out of the closet here’s my very last word:
Science is hard, theory is long, and life is short. Still, we should all do our best not to think in headlines.

Notes

^1_All Cowie references are to (1999)

^2_This is the very same Fiona Cowie who accuses rationalists in general (and me in particular; see p. 106 and passim) of having at best a "mystery mongering" account of learning on offer. Let me see if I’ve got this right: When I say that learning is a mystery, that’s me merely mongering. When she says that learning is mysterious and miraculous, that’s Cowie bravely facing up to the facts.
I wish to request a recount.

^3_This is one of the places where Cowie appears to forget that the empiricist and rationalist are equally in want of independent construals of their key notions `learned’ and `innate.’ Compare Part 1.

^4_I won’t discuss Cowie’s treatment of the historical figures, though I do find some of it pretty peculiar. For a quick example: Cowie thinks that Leibniz thought that you can’t be an Empiricist unless you believe in metaphysically real causation. For, if you don’t, "what this means, metaphysically speaking, is that [the] bearing that our experience appears to have on our mental life is strictly an illusion.(60)" But if not believing in metaphysically real causation makes you not an empiricist, then I suppose even Hume doesn’t qualify. Just this once in what has been in many ways a life of self-denial, I am prepared to invoke a paradigm case argument.

^5_It is , however, not always Chomsky’s way to make life easy for his exegetes. His frequent references to an innate `language organ’ do indeed invite the reading that POSAs are about what mechanisms are available in the `initial state’ of the language acquisition process. In fact, for reasons about to be offered, I doubt very much that that could be the intended force of the metaphor. Rather, Chomsky has it in mind to emphasize the continuity of his nativism with standard biological methodology and theory. About that he is, of course, absolutely right.

^6_In accordance with the usual practice, I’ll sometimes speak of grammars (and of UGs) as true or false, thus equivocating between grammar qua the speaker/hearer’s (putative) internal representation of his language and grammar qua the linguist’s theory of the speaker/hearer’s (putative) internal representation of his language. It’s only the latter about which questions of truth value straightforwardly arise; but fudging the distinction helps a lot with the exegesis, and nothing essential will turn on doing so, as far as I can tell.

^7_Let a grammar of L be `descriptively adequate ’ iff it specifies all and only the sentences of L together with their correct structural descriptions.

^8_I’m told from time to time that the thesis that DOORKNOB is innate is prima facie very implausible. Often, the earnest tone in which this observation is proffered suggests it’s a point that I’ve been supposed not to have noticed. Actually, I do understand that it seems implausible that DOORKNOB is innate. The trouble is, I find it very hard to see what’s wrong with the arguments that appear to require that conclusion. Nor do the plausibility intuitions with which several centuries of uncritical empiricism (to say nothing of a century and a half of Pop-Darwinism) have left us strike me as likely to bear much weight in the long run.

^9_This assumes what all parties to the present discussion agree about: That PAs have concepts as their constituents, and that the constituent structure of a PA is among its essential properties. Only connectionists deny this; and they wouldn’t either if they could figure out some way to stop their connectionism from entailing it. (As, in fact, they’ve occasionally tried to do, but with no success. see Smolensky (1988); Fodor and McLaughlin; and Fodor (both in Fodor (1998b) ).

^10_If you are inclined to deny that there could, I suppose that’s not on account of your views about nativism/empiricism per se, but rather because you hold some form of` `theory/theory’ (or `inferential role’ theory) about the nature of conceptual content. That kind of metaphysics does entail that no concepts can be innate unless some PAs are. For present purposes, you’re welcome to whatever metaphysical assumptions about content you like. Suffice it that, unless you make some, there’s no inference from nativism about concepts to nativism about PAs.

^11_Echt laws of association are supposed to be sensitive only to spatio-temporal relations (`frequency and contiguity’) among the Ideas that they apply to. However, so hopeless is that sort of view as a theory either of learning or of thought, that empiricists have often let `similarity’ and the like determine associations too. That was cheating, of course, unless there’s a domain neutral notion of similarity, (which, of course, there isn’t.) Unsurprisingly, the impulse to cheat this way came back when associationism did. See (eg) the exchange between Churchland (1998), and Fodor and Lepore (1999).

^12_One might argue that the kind of knowledge that explains linguistic capacities is `knowing how’ not `knowing that’, hence that having it doesn’t require believing or cognizing anything. But such a view leads to the rejection, not just of a mentalistic reading of nativism, but to a mentalistic reading of empiricism as well. It is therefore not Cowie’s line. Cowie wants rationalism to be false compatible with the cognitive turn in psychology having been Quite A Good Thing.

^13_Note how Plato (himself a bit of a Platonist) explains the slave-boy’s ability to do geometry in the Meno. Holding that what one knows explains one’s capacities is entirely compatible with holding that the objects of one’s knowledge are non-natural.

^14_A puzzling passage this. One might have thought that I just couldn’t have a better reason for preferring my theory to yours than that yours doesn’t exist. (Assuming, of course, that mine does.) Notice, by the way, how much the "yet" is tendentious. Likewise the "real" in the sentence that follows .Cowie is rather prone to obiter dicta about what "really" explains what.; see below.

^15_My wife is in this line of work, and she assures me that is so. Maybe Cowie should go argue with her.

^16_More precisely, in the PLDs from which they could acquire language, consonant with the normality of the process. Critical experiments, in which the conditions of language acquisition are systematically controlled, are of course not possible; so the distinction between what is merely typical of the acquisition process and what it actually requires is hard to draw. This is a kind of point of which ethologists are forever reminding us: Birds "learn" to fly if they are given normal opportunities to practice. But, as it turns out, they also "learn" to fly if they’re not.
That Cowie is inattentive to this caveat is hardly surprising. If you think of languages the way she prefers to, viz not as things people know but as "spatiotemporally located natural objects" you’re correspondingly unlikely to think of linguistics as responsible to the counterfactuals about what human languages there could be, or the conditions under which humans could acquire them. Cowie says literally nothing about whether she takes linguistics to be responsible to such counterfactuals, or about what she thinks their truth-makers are.

^17_A great lot of the cross-disciplinary discussion of Chomsky’s theory has turned on whether the PLD reliably exhibits sentences whose derivations require structure-dependent operations. That’s what Chomsky gets for offering an example that’s easy to understand. It therefore bears emphasis that structure dependence is only one of very many constraints that UG is supposed to impose upon grammars; hence to which the PLD must testify if the thesis that children approach the PLD with a UG already in mind is to be supposed untrue.

^18_We Ancients remember `subtle cues’ very well. They used to pop up whenever, on the one hand, a psychologist was hell-bent to explain the organization of a creature’s behavior by appeal to the structure of its environment; but, on the other hand, a survey of the creature’s environment failed to reveal psychophysical counterparts of the structure it was presumed to have. Thus Skinnerian behaviorists thought there must be some `stimulus properties’ that are reliable indicators of (as it might be) the bankruptcy of a financial institution; because, after all, some human organisms (viz. accountants) are able to respond in a way that discriminates bankrupt institutions from others in environments that contain the relevant account books. Just what `stimulus property’ controls such selective responses as `the capitalization would appear to be inadequately fluid’ remains, to be sure, a matter for further research. Beyond doubt, it’s one of those `subtle cues.’
So nice to have them back.

^19_There is no indication, either in Cowie or in the literature she cites, how such information (about transition probabilities among phonemes, as it happens) might be employed to isolate anything that’s grammatically pertinent except morpheme boundaries. The rest of a statistical theory of language learning has "yet" to be "worked out."

^20_Rather oddly, Cowie appears to hold both that there’s no case for the child’s lack of negative information in language acquisition and that "there is a dearth of negative evidence in every domain in which people learn. .For example, you learn what Curry is without being told about all the things that curry isn’t (215, my italics)." In fact, Cowie remarks, "human beings learn an awful lot, about bewildering variety of topics, from sketchy and largely positive data. That they can do so… is miraculous and mysterious. It is not, however, a reason to accept a nativist explanation of the miracle as the solution of the mystery" (216). She doesn’t, however, say why it’s not except for remarking that "it’s just absurd to suppose that the domain-specific principles required for learning about curries are innate (215). "Why, one wonders, does Cowie think so? It looks like what’s absurd isn’t supposing that learning about curry requires lots of information that is innate and domain specific, but rather supposing that curry is the domain to which the innate information is specific. (Try food; and see the introduction of practically any serious cookbook; where there’s likely to be an attempt to make some of the relevant domain-specific generalizations explicit.) Likewise, nativists about language don’t suppose that the domain of the innate information that’s used to learn English is English; they only claim that English is in that domain. It’s an open, empirical question --- indeed, one that linguistics is devoted, almost entirely, to answering--- what else is in there too (what it is that all and only the possible natural languages have in common.)
Reductio only works on arguments with false conclusions.

^21_Empiricists are forever giving nativists edifying lectures on this point. Thus Cowie: "Conservative politicians, moralists, and jurists apparently find overwhelming the inference from `innate` to `right’ and `inevitable’… [But] to suppose that something is right just because it is innate is to commit the fallacy of deriving `ought’ from `is’ …. the inference is … being made all the time, with potentially devastating consequences. (x-xi; see also Ellman et al))."
I do find this sort of special pleading extremely offensive.

^22_Bear in mind, by the way, that’s not all a child has to keep him busy. He has to learn a lot of vocabulary too. To say nothing of the geometrical structure of perceptual space, the intuitive physics of middle-sized objects; the intuitive intentional psychology of his conspecifics, and so on; all of which information enlightened empiricists, just like their unilluminated empiricist colleagues, presumably take not to be genotypically carried. (Also, infants sleep a lot.) Since Cowie sticks exclusively to the issue of nativism about language, she is never required to discuss the overall plausibility of the empiricist view of cognitive development. It is probably wise of her not to do so.

^23_Notice, in passing, that the PLD is better evidence for the grammar of L than it is for UG; which suggests (pace EE) that if both are learned, it’s the grammar, and not UG, that should be learned first. L’s grammar expresses the structural similarities that sentences exhibit in virtue of their all belonging to L. UG, by contrast, expresses only the very abstract structural similarities that sentences exhibit in virtue of their all belonging to some natural language or other. (Read `some language’ with short scope relative to the `all’.)
Parallel considerations very strongly suggest that the grammar-acquisition mechanisms should be domain specific even if they’re not innate: The chances are surely overwhelming that arbitrary sentences drawn from a PLD will be more similar to one another (hence better evidence for both the grammar and for the UG) than they are to arbitrary objects of the child’s nonlinguistic experiences. Any sentence of English is ipso facto more similar to another English sentence and to any sentence of Russian then either is to a bird, or Mother, or a jar of emulsified peaches. (That, I suppose, is what it is to think of language as a domain.)Yet it is regularities among a child’s nonlinguistic experiences that his inductions from data to the UG depend on according to EE. "If you assert, therefore, that the understanding of the child is led to this conclusion by any process of argument or ratiocination, I may justly require you to produce that argument, nor have you any pretense to refuse so equitable a demand". (Hume, INQUIRY, Section IV, Part 1).

^24_Since P entails P, it’s not clear that EE adds anything at all to the assumption that the child can’t learn the language unless he knows P.

^25_Cowie appears to hold that iteration arguments somehow require as a premise that UG is psychologically real (see p. 273). But she is quite wrong to think that; as, indeed, the present discussion shows. I’ve used nothing about the ontological status of UG; I’ve assumed only what EE grants: that you can’t learn a first language unless you know that grammatical rules are structure dependent.

^26_It testifies to Kant’s genius that he saw that a cognitive theory that posits across-the-board structural preferences, is in need of a transcendental argument that the world can be relied on to comply with them. But most people doubt that he actually had one.

^27_It’s a considerable irony that the notion of having a concept that Chomsky thinks is needed for such very special purposes as explaining language learning, is much the same one that philosophers who confuse metaphysics and semantics with epistemology think is satisfied by the possession of empirical concepts quite generally: They think that to have a concept is to know `in principle’ how to identify the things it applies to, and/or to know `in principle’ how to bring about states of affairs in which the concept applies. My guess is that Cowie has taken some such verificationist view of concept possession for granted. Putting that together with the observation that, in the general case, concept acquisition doesn’t require a grasp of essences, gives Cowie the argument presently under examination.

^28_Typical avatars of this venerable confusion include the various semantic holisms that so many empiricists now endorse. (The latest being the `theory theory’ of concept individuation, according to which the identity of a concept is determined by the beliefs it is embedded in rather than the other way ‘round.) In semantics (as elsewhere), outbreaks of holism are invariably signs of a foundational blunder. For discussion of this complex of issues, see Fodor and Lepore (1992).

^29_We’ve already seen one reason why 3.2.4 must be true; viz that concepts are ontologically prior to the kinds of things that can be (dis)confirmed. The argument now unfolding waives that objection and assumes, for the sake of the discussion, that the notion of concept learning by hypothesis testing is coherent; but it claims, even so, that primitive concepts can’t be learned that way.

^30_Cowie apparently thinks that "deferential" concepts are somehow an exception. My own view is that the category belongs to sociology, not semantics (see Fodor (1994)). But it will do for present purposes that you can’t reason with a concept unless somebody already has it. That’s a truism, no?

^31_One is reminded of a familiar parody of lawyerly arguments: `My client didn’t do it, he wasn’t there; and even if was there, he didn’t have a gun; and even if he was there and had a gun, it wasn’t loaded; and even if he was there and had a gun and it was loaded…. usw.

^32_Which is not to deny what `methodological solipsism’ claims: viz. that a mental processes applies to the concepts in its domains "solely in virtue of" their nonsemantic properties. That mental processes are syntactically driven doesn’t at all imply that metal representations are syntactically individuated. I can’t begin to tell you how many philosophers have been confused about this over the years.

^33_ As I’ve already suggested, this line of thought depends on taking for granted the (fashionable) externalist view of the supervenience base for semantic properties. Let’s grant this assumption, for which, however, Cowie offers only the following strange argument: "… protoconcepts [can’t] be conceptual roles understood dispositionally as networks of potential [sic] causal/inferential interactions. For protoconcepts are supposed to be innately specified, whereas the dispositions that our concepts have to interact causally or inferentially… are not. I was not born such that my tokenings of PLATYPUS are disposed to cause tokenings of MONOTREME…. (85)" This is, I think, the only argument I’ve ever heard against a conceptual role semantics that doesn’t work. The most it shows is that somebody who is both an internalist and a nativist about concepts shouldn’t also be an unmitigated semantic holist. Rather, he ought to hold that a concept’s innateness requires only the innateness of its constitutive inferences; and, by assumption, much less than every inference that a concept enters into is constitutive. In fact, practically every internalist does hold something like this (often at the price of endorsing an analytic/synthetic distinction.) So, what’s the problem about internalists being nativists?
Notice, in particular, that not even every necessary inference that involves concept C is is ipso facto constitutive of C (assuming constitutive inferences to be the ones that correspond to possession conditions). So, even if you are an inferential role internalist, and even if you think that PLATYPUS is innate, and even if you think that a platypus is a monotreme is necessarily true, you still are not required to claim that a platypus is a monotreme is innate; nor are you required to claim that having the concept MONOTREME is a possession condition for having the concept PLATYPUS; a fortiori, you are not required to claim that having very concept that interacts with PLATYPUS interacts causally is a possession condition for PLATYPUS. Concepts cautions against this mistake, oh, maybe fifty times. To no avail, it appears.

^34_I’m not, of course, supposing that anything so simple would work as a metaphysics of the content of innate concepts; just that the proposal is perfectly bona fide qua externalist. If you want an externalist metaphysics of the content of innate concepts that’s not just bona fide but true, I’m afraid there isn’t one "yet". (But, there isn’t one for learned concepts either; or for words. I don’t suppose that’s an argument that there aren’t any words or concepts.)

^35_In passing, and quite independent of issues about nativism: there’s every reason for an externalist to take content to supervene on possible (including nonactual) causal relations. He thereby disencumbers himself of such embarrassments as Donald Davidson’s `Swampman.’ (According to Davidson, since Swampman has no causal history, he ipso facto has no intentional states.) In semantics as elsewhere, what’s actual doesn’t matter much to the metaphysics; it’s the counterfactuals that count.

^36_I assume (as does Cowie) that the other familiar account according to which `most’ concepts are complex ---viz that they are definitions--- is no longer seriously in the running. For arguments, See Fodor (1998a, Ch.3).

^37_For simplicity, I ignore such content properties of C1 as may be determined by the arrangement of its constituents (i.e. by its `syntax’). This is, to be sure, no small matter; it’s presumably such arrangement features that distinguish (eg.) A PERSON’S FAVORITE CAT from A CAT’S FAVORITE PERSON. But abstracting from the effects of syntax on conceptual content won’t affect our present purposes, and it simplifies the exposition.

^38_There’s some question whether the `second’ component of a concept is to be an extension determiner, or an extension. My own view (but not Cowie’s, as far as I can make out) is that extensions are much the better if those are the choices. For one thing, it’s a lot more plausible that extensions compose than that the world-to-mind relations do that are supposed by externalists to be what fix semantic values. For another thing, it would be nice if the content of a concept were ipso facto at least part of what the concept expresses. This will be so if contents are semantic values, but not if they are the mechanisms that mediate world-to-mind connections. Maybe DOG expresses the set of dogs, or the property of being a dog, or the like. But it certainly doesn’t express whatever the causal hookup is that, by assumption, connects DOG to dogs or to dogness.

^39_To say nothing of not having the concept FROM. Prototype theorists tend to keep an extremely low profile in respect to the possession conditions for concepts that express relations; as well they might since, prima facie anyhow, relation concepts would seem not to have prototypes. Cowie doesn’t discuss the issue.

^40_`Locking’ is a place holder for your favorite (externalist) theory of the relation such that, if it holds between a thought type and a property, then the property is the intentional object of tokens of that thought type.

^41_However, see the footnote before last. God only knows what, if anything, corresponds to prototypes in the case of relational concepts.

^42_Reading `prototypical doorknobs’ rigidly; i.e. as prototypical of actual-world doorknobs.

^43_He has fallen from a window and is half way down.

^44_More precisely, contrary to what many of them have supposed themselves to suppose. If you look closely at paradigm empiricist/constructivist theories of concept acquisition, it’s not at all clear to what extent they endorse intentionalist solutions. Locke and Hume thought that you get RED `brute causally’ from stimulations of the sensorium. Dewey thought you get new concepts by doing some "doing and undergoing"; (whatever that is, it doesn’t sound much like anything intentional.) Piaget thought you get them by doing some "assimilating and accommodating.," (to which the same applies.)

References

Block, N. (1980) Readings in The Philosophy of Psychology, 2 vols. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of The Theory of Syntax, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Chomsky, N. (1972) Language And Mind, Harcourt Brace Javonovich NY.

Churchland, P.M. (1998) "Conceptual similarity across sensory and neural diversity," in Churchland, P.M. and Churchland, P. On The Contrary, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Cowie, F. (1999) What's Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press, NY.

Elman, J. et al (1996), Rethinking Innateness, A Connectionist Perspective on Development, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Fodor, J. A. (1981) "The Present Status of the Innateness Controversy", in his Representations, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Fodor, J. A. (1994) The Elm and The Expert, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Fodor, J. A. (1998a) Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. New York: Oxford University Press.

Fodor. J. A., (1998b), In Critical Condition, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Fodor. J. A., (1998b_4), "There Are No Recognitional Concepts - Not Even RED" Chapter 4 in (1998b)

Fodor. J. A., (1998b_5), "There Are No Recognitional Concepts - Not Even RED, Part 2: The Plot Thickens" Chapter 5 in (1998b)

Fodor, J. A., (1998b_10) "Connectionism and the Problem of Systematicity (continued): Why Smolensky's Solution Still Doesn't Work", Cognition 1996, 62, 109-119, reprinted as Chapter 10 of (1998b).

Fodor, J. A. (1998c) Unambiguous triggers,’ Linguistic Inquiry, 29.1, 1-36.

Fodor, J. A. (2000) The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way, MIT Press, Cambridge MA.

Fodor, J. and Lepore, E. (1992), Holism, A Shopper’s Guide, Oxford, Blackwell.

Fodor, J. and Lepore, E (1999) "All at sea in semantic space; Paul Churchland on meaning similarity" Journal of Philosophy XCVI, no. 8, August. 381-403.

Fodor, J. A. and McLaughlin, B. (1990) "Connectionism and the Problem of Systematicity: Why Smolensky's Solution Doesn't Work", Cognition, 35, 183-204, reprinted as Chapter 9 of (1998b).

Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992) Beyond Modularity, MIT Press, Cambridge MA.

Nozick, R. (1981) Philosophical Explanations, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Putnam, H. (1975), "The meaning of 'meaning’", in Gunderson, K. (ed.) Minnesota Studies in The Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minn.

Smolensky, P. (1988) "The proper treatment of connectionism,: Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 11, 1-23.

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William S. Paley TV Fest: Battlestar Galactica The cast and crew of the Sci Fi remake discuss the series.

2006-03-12T10:12:00.000-08:00

William S. Paley TV Fest: Battlestar Galactica

The cast and crew of the Sci Fi remake discuss the series.

by Eric Goldman

March 9, 2006 - In this entry in IGN's look at the 2006 William S. Paley Television Festival held by the Museum of Television and Radio, we take a look at their night devoted to The Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica. Of all the great shows being honored this year, this was definitely the entry I was most excited about attending, as there is simply no better show on right now then Battlestar, a brilliant remake of the 1970's space adventure. With one exception, the entire main cast attended the event honoring the show, including Edward James Olmos ("William Adama"), Mary McDonnell ("Laura Roslin"), Katee Sackhoff ("Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace"), Jamie Bamber ("Lee 'Apollo' Adama), James Callis ("Gaius Baltar") and Grace Park ("Sharon 'Boomer' Valerii"). They were joined by Executive Producer David Eick and Executive Producer/Writer Ron Moore. Unfortunately cast member Tricia Helfer ("Number Six") couldn't make it, but left an amusing video greeting that played on the screen above the panelists heads before they spoke, in which she asked the audience to "be nice to these guys up here!"

Much has been made of the show's rather grim tone and analogies to September 11th, with its look at a human society suddenly and brutally attacked and forced to run for their lives. Eick remarked that when the project was first offered to him, his response was, "'Well why would anyone want to remake Battlestar Galactica?' And it really didn't seem to me to be the kind of opportunity that it became until Ron and I sat down and talked about it in terms of how it would resonate with an audience today differently then it did then, based on the time that we were in. There were a series of very dark conversations at first, because it's difficult to talk about the annihilation of a people in a fantastical or escapist way given the time we were in. And it continued to color a lot of our earliest conversations and obviously continues to impact the show now."

Moore said he also had some initial hesitation. "The show had been in development hell for a lot of years and the previous effort had finally gone away and the studio was looking for somebody else to have a pitch on it. And I said, 'I'm not sure.' I wasn't sure if frankly I wanted to do it. I had done ten years at Star Trek, so I had done a lot of time in space. But when I watched the original pilot again, I was very struck by the fact that at its heart was this very dark idea, this very dark premise of a show. That in the opening moments, an entire civilization is lost. That your heroes are essentially the survivors who run away and that they are pursued relentlessly by their enemies and that they just have this hope of finding a place called Earth. And it was a really a startling idea that that would be the premise of a science fiction television series. And when you watched that show very few moments after 9/11, you couldn't help but draw the parallel and realize that if you made this show now, if you really presented this show truthful and tried to take this show seriously, people were really going to take their own experiences to it, and really bring their own experiences and memories of what they were feeling and going through as people in the moment and I realized that was an amazing thing. That's a gift. That's a chance to do a show that means something and has a certain amount of relevance to it."

Moore explained that the show is meant to reflect, "How we deal with issues of liberty vs. security. And what it means to be in a society that is very afraid that they'll be attacked again and how they balance that in terms of a democracy. And then on an unconscious level, there's little touches and grace notes within the show. Things like the memorial wall where people put up pictures of all the family members that they've lost. That's something that I just wrote and then realized I was really lifting it directly from things that you had seen." Eick elaborated on the moments on the show that resonate in our modern world saying, "It's not a conscious thing like in Law and Order where they'll literally sit with the headlines and go through them and decide what they're going to adapt. It's much more subtle then that. And again, I think because of the universe that we're in and the context that we've set, it's really difficult to come up with stories that don't somehow intersect with what's going on in the world today. We have a president, we have an election, we have prisoners of war. We have things that are going to intersect or resonate with what is going on on CNN, whether we're consciously aiming for that or not. And it's sort of nice to find ourselves writing to that or sometimes even being done with an episode and realizing things about it that have an impact or have some sort of ironic touch that we didn't even intend going into it."

As far as casting the show, Moore said he rarely thinks of specific actors while writing roles, but that, "In all honesty, the only role I had a specific actor in mind for on the show was Mary McDonnell for Laura Roslin." As for Olmos, Eick explained, "We used Eddie as our archetype for reasons that are pretty clear to anyone that has seen Blade Runner. We were really strongly influenced by a lot of the elements of that film, as well as the Philip K. Dick story. And we just kept talking about how sinister Eddie's character was in that and so that persona started taking route. It's very unusual, because you never get these people when you start using them as archetype's and so it still strikes me now, I'll think, 'Oh my god, I can't believe we actually got those two!'" As Eick was relating this story, Olmos, sitting right next to him, slowly removed a piece of paper from his pocket and looked menacingly at Eick as he began to fold it, to the great delight of the many Blade Runner fans in the audience who applauded the reference. Olmos explained how wary he was of joining the project, noting, " I had no intention of ever being in a sci-fi anything!" He said that what really got him hooked was a two-page introduction attached to the script. "Ron had written a mission statement and then placed it in front of the script that we all read. And it was so beautifully written and it just described the world so well and I knew that they were taking a lot of stuff from a lot of different things that they'd experienced."

Moore added that ironically, "Nobody was supposed to read the mission statement! It was a complete accident that any of the cast ever saw it. The mission statement was a complete sales document. We were getting ready to send the script up to the network and the studio. David said, 'We need to write like a cover letter. A memo. Tell them what you're trying to do!' And I was like, 'We have pitched this, we have talked about this! How many times do I have to tell them what the show is?' And he said, "No, no, no. I've done this before. I'm a suit! I know how these things work, so write up this mission statement.' I said, 'Okay; This is what the show is; I wrote off these two pages in like an afternoon. It was supposed to go up the line just to the studio and the network. They liked it. The show got greenlit and we moved on. And then unbeknownst to me, somebody started to just staple the mission statement to this script. David, you're looking guilty!"

Eick acknowledged that leaving the mission statement attached to all the scripts was a calculated move. "I was always aware that the title would be both a blessing and a curse. Because if you'd seen the title page and nothing else, you might not have turned to Page 2." Olmos also noted that socially, the show struck a cord with him. "I liked the idea of putting a Latino into outer space. We'd never been there. We had Robert Beltran who was in Star Trek and we had The Wrath of Khan and that's it." Olmos then related a sweet story about a friend of his calling him because her young nephew told her, "I saw us in the future! I saw Battlestar Galactica and we're in the future!" Commenting on the fact that while the show has had tremendous critical acclaim, it still remains under the radar for many, Olmos said, "We just had a meeting about the whole understanding of bringing commercialization to this piece. How do we get people to be aware for it and vote for us and do things. And I said, 'Are you kidding? It's just, do great shows! Continue to do great shows and that's it!"

Asked what drew her to the role of Laura Roslin, who suddenly finds herself President of the surviving humans in the wake of the robotic Cylon attack, McDonnell joked, "Well, I wanted to be a Latino in space!" She then remarked, 'I read the script and I immediately felt that it had absolutely had nothing to do with my pre-conceived notions. And I was immediately taken by that. Because I felt that the world of Battlestar is the world that we are in. I need as an artist to be connected to things that are speaking to people and to our lives as they are. And if I was going to commit to a TV series, I needed to be able to commit to something that made me feel connected to the people, as opposed to something that separated me because of the elusory quality of the show. I also was very inspired by the idea of being able to play a middle-aged woman who discovers power. Who was not prepared for the situation, because I think that's quite often the case with women of my age. Even though we grew up during feminist years, we weren't necessarily raised from the day we were born to be prepared for the situations and I loved the idea of me discovering it within the show."

The rest of the cast were asked to relate how they came to be on the show and Sackoff laughed, saying, "I have to be honest. I needed a job and I wanted to shoot a gun! I got the script and I read it and I was like, 'Oh my god! This is so my part!' I continued to just love it the more I thought about it. I was having dreams about it, about this character.

"I thought it was my part from the second I read the script. I was like, 'They don't even want to send these other girls!'" Sackhoff then explained that she wasn't familiar with the fact that the original series Starbuck was in fact a man. "I called my dad. He was like, 'Battlestar Galactica, huh? What role? …Right. Um. Maybe you should see the original, Katee.' I sat down with my best friend and a bottle of wine and within the first two minutes, we were like, 'Dude, we must be really drunk. Because they're talking about Starbuck. Where's Starbuck?! …Oh my god!" Elaborating on what excited her about the character, Sackhoff said, "She was such a strong female. Such a strong female in her 20's, which is such an interesting thing to play. And I'd never had the opportunity to play someone that was so driven and so sure of who they were. And that I found very exciting. I found it also extremely interesting that one of the most flawed people on the show was one of the most outwardly strong. You know, the people with the biggest bravado are usually the people that are the most insecure and have the most to hide. And I liked that about her. She just kept going. Like every time she gets beat down, she just gets back up. And she's like, "Alright, I screwed up again. Let's keep going.'"

Bamber, whose real life British accent is a surprise to those familiar with him from the show, related his own initial reaction to the project. "My manager handed me the script and I read the title and I had a sphincter tightening, butt clenching, 'remake-itus' moment. And I handed it straight back to him. And I had a mission statement moment, actually. When I finally opened up and read this mission statement, I was actually blown away by the elegance with which Ron and David had presented the show. I had watched the show as a kid and had these blurry memories, seeing Vipers shoot out of tunnels. All very phallic!" Bamber said that once he read the script, he was captivated. "The story was absolutely engaging. The premise was riveting. The whole idea of a world in which the military has become obsolete and is being downsized was so pertinent to the debates that certainly go on in the UK. We think of ourselves as living in peaceful times and yet we're not. And this cataclysm suddenly blindsides them from nowhere. And there are images, like the museum on Galactica: The weapons arsenal or something has been turned into a gift shop up on the ship, which is so British in a sense. The Tower of London is a scary, god-fearing building where people died grisly deaths, but now Beefeaters lead you along so you can have candyfloss along the way! And I loved the character. I loved that everyone in the show is really screwed up. I liked the fact that you expected him to be kind of heroic, and he was chippy and adolescent and not sorted. And the beauty of that is it gives you a place to go."

"It was a grisly auditioning process," noted Bamber. "About five different auditions. You went to this thing that was a bit like Survivor, where you went into a big tall building and there's six guys that looked like me, except better looking and bigger." As Bamber related this story, Sackhoff was laughing hysterically and nodding in agreement. He then pointed at her saying, "There were about twelve of her! And Grace was there. And we all sort of played scenes together until there were four of us left." Bamber humorously noted how intense the whole process was, "Walking into a room of suits who just sort of make you feel completely inadequate. And I remember going home shaking in the car thinking, 'I've just been eviscerated by what should be nice people!' And I got home and later that night I got the job, and I got obliterated, and it was great."

Callis agreed with Bamber, remarking, "I have to say that the selection process for getting the job is more rigorous then the US presidential election. They absolutely do have to be very sure of who they want." The night had begun with a screening of a clip from the original Battlestar Galactica, featuring that show's campy, over the top Baltar. So the audience knew exactly what Callis was talking about and laughed loudly as he said, "I received the script from my manager. And he was like, 'This is a brilliant part James! Absolutely brilliant part!' I had seen the original, and I said, 'Oh, fantastic! Who is it?" And he went, 'Baltar.' And I said, 'Baltar!? What are you talking about? I don't want to be some kooky guy in a cape!'" Callis' Baltar is an antsy, constantly on the edge, possibly insane man, and Callis joked that his own behavior might have helped him get the role. "The thing was, I actually rolled up for my first audition on the wrong day. So I walked through the door, and I was very bold in that way I suppose, because I was slightly scared and nervous. And they're all like, '…yeah?' And I called my manager's office and said, 'They don't know what they're doing. They're totally unprepared!' He's like, 'No James, you're actually there on the wrong day. And you look like you don't know what you're doing.' And I got the part!"

Some of the show's funnier moments come from Callis, and he explained that this humorous side really began in the audition process. "One of the things I thought when I initially read it, was the huge curve that my character was going to go on. And the scene that I auditioned over and over again was the scene where Tricia finds me in bed with another woman, which I thought was hysterical. And I remember [director] Michael Rymer, after my first audition, looked at me and he's like, 'There's like an element of humor going on. And I think it's dangerous.' And I really didn't know what the hell he was talking about! I was like wracking my head. It was like, why is humor dangerous? Then I met him at the next audition, and I went, 'When you say it's dangerous, you mean like, it's dangerous… for the show?' He went, 'Yes.' I then went into one of these auditions and basically did the same thing that I did before and he came out went, 'Well, forget what I said before. Because I seem to like it.' Callis also singled out the visual style of the show as playing a vital part in what makes it work. "I'm always amazed about how the show looks. The script and dialogue are absolutely brilliant, but there's the cinematography, and the way that this thing works. And I'm really just like being gob smacked at just how brilliant this thing was and that I was lucky enough to be involved in it."

The moderator noted that Park had initially read for Starbuck, and she explained that her auditioning process began even earlier with another supporting character. "Before that I auditioned for Dualla. And then after that, Starbuck." The Asian Park remarked, "Then me, and Katee and I think a Latino girl were all there at first. And it was like, 'What are you here for?' 'Starbuck.' 'What are you here for?' 'Starbuck.' And I'm thinking, 'They really have no fracking idea what they want!' I feel so superficial now after listening to everybody else, because I remember on the audition it said 'recurring' and I was like, 'oh, yesss!' And then I didn't get Starbuck and I was pissed. I definitely did not want to play Sharon, because she seemed like the nice girl." This led to the funniest exchange of the evening, with Sackhoff exclaiming, "But I wanted to play Sharon!" Park responded, "I know, and I wanted to play Starbuck," to which Callis deadpanned, "I'd love to play with both of you!"

Park explained that she never actually read for the role she was eventually cast in. "I just got the role of Sharon. I auditioned for Starbuck. And then they gave it to me and of course now I'm ecstatic that I get her." The mini-series that launched the series ended with the revelation that Sharon is actually an enemy Cylon in human form, which was news to Park when she got the part. "I remember reading the script again, because I originally read it for Starbuck, and then when I read it again as Sharon, I saw the ending; 'By your command!' And I was like, 'When did they change this? My God, she's a Cylon!' Ron said 'No, it's always been like that!' It just goes to show, when you really read only wanting to see one thing that's all you see." I had been amused to note that Park had used the show's all-purpose curse word "frack" while telling her story and McDonnell said she finds herself using it too all the time, explaining, "It really works out as a mom, because you don't have to cop to saying the F word."

A female audience member noted that she was a military veteran and had high praise for Sackhoff's portrayal of a solider. She asked how Sackhoff, with no military experience herself, is so convincing, and the actress was clearly touched. "Thank you so much for the compliment. Coming from you that's amazing. I appreciate that. My dad was in the military and one of my best friends was in Afghanistan for a couple of years. And he called me all the time from Afghanistan. He's like, 'We're watching the show! You're holding the gun like a girl!' So, I really can't draw from real knowledge of those experiences, but I can draw off of moments where I was terrified or scared or insecure or something. And I asked my dad a lot, but for the most part, I fly by the seat of my pants until these guys over there tell me that I was horrible."

As the night drew to a close, Moore recalled pitching the show to the Sci Fi Channel's president Bonnie Hammer, and how it was a somewhat awkward videoconference situation. "I'm trying to pitch to her, and I keep looking down at me on the screen. 'Am I in frame?' But the thing that struck me the most was how engaged she was at the pitch. I was telling her the story of Galactica: 'Here's this place, and there's a ship and it's going to be a museum.' And she was intrigued. And the moment I knew I had her, I said, "Oh, and then there's Starbuck. Who in our version is a woman.' And Bonnie went, 'Yes!' And I was like, "We're making this show!'"

Why They Really Think They Must Defeat Iran

2006-03-12T10:04:00.000-08:00

Weekend Edition
March 11 / 12, 2006

"We Have No Choice"

Why They Really Think They Must Defeat Iran

By GARY LEUPP

"The problem of the Iranian regime has become entrenched over the course of an entire generation," Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns told the House International Relations Committee March 8. "It may require a generational struggle to address it, but we have no choice but to do so." As the International Atomic Energy Agency---heavily pressured by the U.S. to condemn Iran---was meeting to finalize a report to the UN Security Council about the country's nuclear program, Burns (the number three man in the State Department) left little doubt as to Washington's ultimate intentions. "We must defeat Iran in its pursuit of nuclear weapons and its sponsorship of terrorism and its subjugation of the people of Iran."

He might as well have just said, "We must defeat Iran" and left it at that. The nuclear weapons, terrorism and repression issues are all pretexts for regime change, just as they were with Iraq. If Burns were more candid, less Straussian, he might say something like the following:

"The Iranian regime, which emerged after a popular uprising toppled our puppet the Shah in 1979, has been able to survive these many years. That's a damned shame, because from 1953 to 1979 the U.S. called the shots in that populous, petroleum-rich, strategically located country which we'd placed on a par with NATO allies by the 1970s. It was an incalculable loss---we're still not reconciled to it---made all the worse because we couldn't just dismiss it as an anti-American plot by anyone in particular. The uprising was so huge and inclusive, involving the revolutionary left, progressive democrats, various Islamists and pretty much everybody. The fact is, it happened because our Shah had subjugated the people of Iran, just as we accuse the present government of doing, and the people rebelled as subjugated people tend to do.

"What we could do was use the 'hostage crisis' (that occurred after we refused to hand over the Shah for trial) to encourage anti-Iranian feeling and aggressive nationalism here in the U.S. back in the Carter and Reagan years. In a country burned by the Vietnam War and beset by the pacifistic "Vietnam Syndrome," the outpouring of bloodlust was a comforting sign that Americans might once again unite behind a 'good war' against dehumanized others. But the regime became entrenched, despite the Iraqi war of aggression against it in the 1980s---which we supported, of course---and our tireless efforts to undermine it.

"But since 9-11 we've found that we can manipulate public opinion against any Muslim target, by raising fears of terrorist attacks and mushroom clouds over New York. Fortunately, Iran supports Palestinian and Lebanese organizations that we, for our own and Israel's reasons, list as 'terrorist.' Fortunately, many Americans are willing to believe that all the Muslim 'terrorist' groups are somehow linked to those who attacked the U.S. four and a half years ago. They're altogether willing to believe they're all linked---if only through the presence of Evil in the cosmos---to al-Qaeda. So we can tell them that Iran is trying to build nukes, and repeat that again and again. Inclined to believe the worst about Muslims they'll buy our claims. Of course we don't really know what Iran's up to, and the scientists tell us that Iran's years away from the ability to produce nukes. We just assume, anyway, that any government leading a big self-respecting country like Iran---which is surrounded by nuclear China, India, Pakistan, Russia and Israel and targeted for overthrow by our nuclear selves---probably does want to have nuclear weapons someday. So what we need to say is, they're definitely working on nukes, right now, and even though of course an Iran with nukes would no more threaten the U.S. than (say) Pakistan, we can throw down the gauntlet on this issue.

"So when we say 'we have no choice' but to 'address' the 'Iranian problem' and 'defeat it,' we don't really mean we feel any actual necessity to smash Iran to defend the U.S. (We don't even think we need to do it to defend Israel, although of course Iran's a much bigger threat to Israel than to us, and we need to emphasize that issue---as the president has---before some audiences more than others. It gets a bit tricky, because on the one hand you want to gather support from AIPAC and other groups who've been calling the Iranian government an "existential threat" to Israel and desperately promoting a U.S. attack on Iran as the preferred alternative to an Israeli one. On the other, you don't want people saying, 'Bush wants to attack Iran just to help Israel.' You want to kind of downplay that aspect, and if people start playing it up in the wrong way, you need to accuse them of anti-Semitism and make them shut up.)

"The real necessity we feel here, ladies and gentlemen, is the need to compete with other imperialist countries for geopolitical position in this post-Cold War era, especially in this region overflowing with oil. Used to be that if we wanted to attack one of these countries we'd have to deal with the Soviet Union! But here nowadays we have this huge chunk of real estate stretching from Central Asia to the Mediterranean, this slough of nasty Muslim states that's up for grabs. If we control it, through puppet regimes, dot it with military bases, capitalize its development, control the flow of petroleum products from it---well, then, we'll be well-positioned to take on any emerging rivals. We'll have Europe and Japan and China over a barrel. We have no choice but to seize the opportunity to build empire---or risk decline vis-à-vis our friendly and less friendly contenders in what we intend to make the "New American Century."

"Now, we can't put it in those terms for public consumption, because normal Americans don't think empire-building's worth the lives of their kids. But just between you and me, Congressmen and Congresswomen, if we're going to pull this off we have to use 'noble lies' to scare the masses and make them think we must defeat Iran. Any attack on Iran in the near future will be entirely a war of choice. But we must say in public the exact opposite to obtain our goals. We really have no choice but to say we have no choice in order to take advantage of the opportunities."

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

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Why They Really Think They Must Defeat Iran

"We Have No Choice"

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